The gaming community reacted in shock and sadness on Sunday, after a mass shooting at a Florida eSports event left three people dead.

The shooting turned what had been a good-natured season-opening event for a league of passionate Madden football players into the latest scene of carnage resulting from a mass shooting in the US.

"It's heartbreaking," said eSports journalist and consultant Rod "Slasher" Breslau. "It's very hurtful to have these kinds of issues that we see everyday here as Americans, and now it's coming directly home."

The tournament, which was taking place at a bar in the Jacksonville Landing outdoor mall, was hosted by Electronic Arts, the publisher of the Madden video game franchise. The event was the first of four regional qualifiers for the Madden Championship event slated for later this year in Las Vegas. The event featured several professional players as well as dozens of aspiring eSports players.

While eSports has grown into a more than $500 million industry according to Goldman Sachs, the leagues based on real-world sports like football and basketball are generally considered smaller than the leagues for fantasy and first-person-shooter games such as Call of Duty and Dota 2.

But news of the tragedy quickly spread across the broader industry of video gamers and eSports contestants. During a League of Legends tournament on Sunday, the video stream included a live statement to pay respects to the victims of the shooting in Florida.

And Overwatch, another game with a popular league, also made a statement.

Ninja, the famous video game streamer who is most famous for playing Fortnite: Battle Royale, tweeted condolences to those affected and cited the "evil times we live in."

Authorities identified the suspect as David Katz, a 24-year old gamer from Baltimore, Maryland, and said he died of self inflicted wounds.

According to the LA Times, the shooter was a participant in the Madden tournament who had been disqualified earlier in the day, but authorities did not provide a motive or confirm whether Katz was involved in the tournament.

EA did not return requests for comment, though it tweeted statements earlier that it was working with the authorities to gather facts about the "horrible" situation.

The rapid growth of eSports have prompted concerns about security at gaming events.

TwitchAccording to Breslau, there have been occasions at some eSports events when people have managed to get in front of the video cameras streaming the tournaments. Although those incidents involved people being crass or making jokes, they highlighted a lack of security within the fast-growing industry, Breslau said.

In 2015, two gamers were arrested after travelling from Iowa to a Pokemon tournament in Boston equipped with 12-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle.

While the security at major eSports events is generally on par with that of professional sporting events, that's not usually case at the numerous smaller events like Sunday's Madden qualifier, which took place in a bar.

The atmosphere at live gaming events can be intense, Breslau noted, especially when significant prize money is at stake. Trash talking among players is very common. But Breslau stressed that the overall experience is one of fun.

"We're a community of gamers," Breslau said, noting that he's never witnessed a real-world physical fight at an event before.

And while the shooting occurred at a tournament for a football game, Breslau said he's bracing for some people to try to blame video games for the violence.

"I know the gaming community will come out and be a positive force in the wake of everything that happened this weekend," Breslau said, but "I do know that some people will try to make this about 'Gamers are bad.'"

A shooting at a video game tournament Sunday afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida has reportedly left at least four people dead, including one suspect.

Jacksonville news outlet WJXT reported at least 11 were shot at the livestream tournament of the new game Madden NFL 19, hosted at the GLHF Game Bar at Jacksonville Landing, an outdoor mall.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office tweeted to confirm the shooting, writing "Mass shooting at the Jacksonville Landing. Stay far away from the area. The area is not safe at this time. STAY AWAY #TheLandingMassShooting."

"We can't stress enough to stay away. Many blocks away," the account later tweeted.

The office also tweeted there were "multiple fatalities at the scene, many transported," before confirming "one suspect is dead at the scene, unknown at this time if we have a second suspect. Searches are being conducted."

One suspect is reported to be dead at the scene and police tweeted it is unknown at this time if there is a second suspect.

SWAT is searching the scene for survivors and any other possible suspects. Authorities encouraged anyone trapped inside to call 911 so they could find them.

A recording of the Twitch live stream shows two competitors playing the game before what looks like it could be a red laser appears on one of their sweatshirts. The video's screen then switches as gunshots are fired.

Madden publisher and host of the tournament, Electric Arts, tweeted "this is a horrible situation, and our deepest sympathies go out to all involved."

Florida Governor Rick Scott tweeted that he had been in touch with Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry to offer "state support and resources" for dealing with the shooting.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted that local authorities were in touch with federal resources for the next steps in responding to the shooting.

The shooting comes two days after a gunman killed one person and left two injured at a high school football game, which Florida Senator Bill Nelson referenced in a tweet, writing "Word of another tragic mass shooting in our state brings shock and outrage."

Nelson urged "right now, law enforcement are doing their jobs under horrific circumstances and it's important that people in the Jacksonville area heed their warnings."

This is a developing story. Refresh for updates.

A global dust storm on Mars is threatening the future of NASA's Opportunity rover, the longest-lived robot on that planet.

The golf-cart-size vehicle launched toward Mars in June 2003, landed in January 2004, and was supposed to last three months. Today, the rover is 15 years old and has rolled more than a marathon's worth of miles across the surface of the red planet using solar power.

But Opportunity now seems to be in trouble.

Thanks to the long-lasting global dust storm, which has now raged for nearly two months, Opportunity fell asleep on June 10 and hasn't phoned home.

Global dust storms appear once every couple of years and shroud the planet in a dull-red haze, but NASA said this is "one of the most intense" ever recorded.

"This is the worst storm Opportunity has ever seen, and we're doing what we can, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best," Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist at Cornell University and leader of the rover mission, told A.J.S. Rayl for a recent Planetary Society blog post.

Why the dust storm is endangering Opportunity

Mars in 2001 as it typically appeared (left) and how the red planet looked after a global dust storm appeared (right).NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The Martian weather event has not only blocked light to Opportunity's solar panels, but also coated them in fine dust. This one-two punch has dramatically lowered the rover's ability to store and use electrical energy.

Cold is a big issue on Mars, where winter temperatures can drop to -100 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator. Such cold can shrink bits of metal in electronic circuits and snap them.

Little buttons of nuclear material called plutonium-238 help keep Opportunity's circuitry warm, but the stuff doesn't last forever and is well-decayed — so it's not hot enough to fully protect the rover's systems. This means Opportunity still needs electricity to keep its battery charged, run circuit-warming heaters, and talk to NASA mission control back on Earth.

Draining the batteries too low is also problematic. The longer they're inactive, the more electrical storage capacity they lose. If the storm doesn't break soon, and Martian dust devils don't blow the dust off Opportunity's solar panels, NASA says there's a possibility the batteries could "brown out," or suddenly dip in voltage.

If that happens, or the rover can't recover a variety of "fault modes," Opportunity will join the ranks of Spirit — its nearly identical sister rover.

Spirit stopped talking to NASA in March 2010, during a Martian winter. Engineers tried to regain contact with Spirit for more than a year before calling it quits. (Spirit is now presumably another dead robot on the red planet.)

Now for the good news

Simulated images show what NASA's Opportunity rover saw as a global Martian dust storm blotted out the sun in June 2018.NASA/JPL-Caltech/TAMU

NASA said in an August 16th press release that "there's reason to be optimistic," since the storm appears to be weakening. This could mean enough sunlight may soon hit Opportunity's solar panels to charge up its batteries and phone home.

The agency also said that the batteries were in "relatively good" working condition before the storm, so "there's not likely to be too much degradation." Dust storms also tend to warm up the environment, so that will help buffer against circuit-busting cold.

Opportunity is "not out of the woods" yet, though. A representative at NASA told Business Insider there is "no update" on the rover's status, which means the agency has yet to hear back.

This is one of the longest periods a solar-powered robot has ever hibernated on Mars to conserve energy. Opportunity has already pushed its engineered lifetime by a decade and a half — and it's not getting any younger.

"Even if engineers hear back from Opportunity, there's a real possibility the rover won't be the same," NASA said. "No one will know how the rover is doing until it speaks."

Investment in two fields that promise to be the next big thing in computing — augmented and virtual reality — has exploded over the last year or so, frequently hitting highs of more than half a billion dollars a quarter.

But when you remove Magic Leap, one of the buzziest startups in the space, from the analysis, it's a very different story.

New data from analytics firm CB Insights, as highlighted in a research note by Goldman Sachs analysts, indicates that funding in the space has effectively stalled at around the $100 million mark for the last four quarters running — with the exception of Magic Leap.

Virtual reality is all about building virtual worlds and immersive, 365-degree headsets and hardware that let users experience it like they're really there. Augmented reality, a closely-related technology, takes these virtual objects and overlays them over the real world via special headsets or smartphone cameras.

Advocates of the tech say it will revolutionize how humans interact with computers, radically lowering the barriers between what is real and what is "virtual."

Magic Leap's headset. Magic Leap

Magic Leap, which builds augmented reality headsets, has been shrouded in secrecy for years. It has a roster of A-list investors including Google and Alibaba, and has repeatedly pulled in funding rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars ($502 million in Q4 2017, and another $461 million in Q1 2018, for example). It finally, officially launched its first hardware product in August 2018.

The data clearly illustrates just how disproportionate Magic Leap's levels of investment are to the broader industry, and how, once the firm is taken out of the picture, the levels of capital flowing in to support AR and VR have hit a years-long plateau.

The light blue bars are Magic Leap investments, light blue is AR/VR investments excluding Magic Leap, and the grey line represents deal volume. Goldman Sachs

Of course, venture capital data alone doesn't offer a comprehensive view of investment in the industry. Major players like Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all quietly developing their own versions of the technology in-house; Microsoft's own AR headset, the HoloLens, beat Magic Leap to the market by over two years.

These companies don't break out how their spending on AR/VR-specific R&D, so there's no accurate way for outside observers to assess the total investment being made into building the tech.

Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini takes a positive view of the direction of investment in AR/VR startups, writing that "these fundings help to underscore our viewpoint that potential use cases for AR/VR continue to grow as the technology continues to mature. Given the trajectory of AR/VR funding in 2Q18, we remain confident in our view that AR/VR investment remains on the rise."

Indeed, the general trajectory for both funding levels and volume of deals remains slowly positive, despite the recent deceleration.

The HoloLens, Microsoft's augmented reality headset. Microsoft

What's most clear from the data is just how anomalous Magic Leap is, and how the hype has translated into unprecedented amounts of cash flowing into its coffers. And now that its debut product, the Magic Leap One, is on the market, some critics have suggested that the device wasn't worth the wait.

The Verge's Adi Robertson said it "doesn't seem like a satisfying computing device," while Scott Stein at CNET wrote that "my initial experience didn't blow me away, despite Magic Leap's promises." And The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern called it "a bold, exciting, petrifying vision of the future" — but after testing it out, cautioned: "I don't suggest anyone run out to buy one—maybe not for years."

These responses could ominous news for Magic Leap — and run the risk of sparking disillusionment with the nascent technology, making fundraising even more difficult for the rest of the industry before it's even really had its breakthrough moment. In other words, with this much money flowing in, Magic Leap will have to prove it's more than just hype.

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John Somorjai, executive vice president of corporate development, started Salesforce Ventures in 2009. Salesforce If it seems like there are a lot of applications and tools that integrate with or live on Salesforce, it's no accident. The company's secret weapon is Salesforce Ventures, a corporate investment arm with $1.02 billion in equity in other companies — but only ones that work with the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce Ventures is one of the most active firms in corporate venture capital, third behind GV (Google) and Intel Capital in 2017, according to CB Insights.

The firm makes an average of one deal a week between new and return investments, and while its investments are by all accounts a success financially, making bank isn't actually one of its goals.

"Our financial returns have been excellent but that's not the priority for the program," John Somorjai, executive vice president of corporate development, told Business Insider.

"The goal for the program is being this strategic investor that's helping to deliver these great solutions for our customers. The good news though is because we can help these companies along the way, they tend to do quite well," he said.

Unlike its peers in venture capital, Salesforce Ventures doesn't take board seats and rarely leads a financing round. This keeps the team in good graces with big name investors, particularly Bessemer Venture Partners and Accel, so they frequently gets deals on the recommendation of other firms.

Last quarter, the company saw gains of $211 million on its strategic investments, which is equal to 7% of its over all revenues for the quarter, according to a company filing.

In total, Salesforce Ventures has made 275 investments. Twelve of its portfolio companies have gone public and more than 50 of them have been acquired.

In fact, 11 have been acquired by Salesforce itself — the most recent being CloudCraze, a business-to-business commerce platform built on top of Salesforce, which got acquired in March.

Salesforce Ventures grows the greater ecosystem

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited with CEO Marc Benioff in San Francisco. Salesforce has a $100 million fund dedicated to Canadian startups. Salesforce

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff came up with the idea in 2009, when the Great Recession made it difficult for small cloud startups to get off the ground.

"He kept hearing those stories of our partners having trouble raising money," said Somorjai, who joined the company in 2005 to start its corporate development team. "It was so critically important for us to build this ecosystem around Salesforce, so he told me to start this program up and I was thrilled to do it."

Since then, Salesforce Ventures has grown to 12 dedicated people across offices in San Francisco, Chicago, London and Tokyo. It has six active funds, including a $100 million fund dedicated to Canadian startups, and a $100 million fund for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

[Read about Salesforce's biggest public investments]

While global in nature, Salesforce Ventures is strict about where its money goes. Somorjai said his team sticks to variations on a theme: those that integrate with Salesforce; those that build on top of Salesforce; and those that implement Salesforce solutions.

"It's really important that as we grow, we have these capabilities that are built all around Salesforce on a global basis," Somorjai said.

Many of its best deals come on the recommendation of customers, and from sales and product executives who witness the interesting ways that people use the Salesforce platform.

One of Salesforce Venture's most recent investments is in a consulting firm called Virsys12, which was founded by CEO Tammy Hawes in 2011 to help healthcare providers use Salesforce. The startup sell its own apps and helps companies use Salesforce more efficiently.

Ahead of its investment, Salesforce gave Virsys12 an award for its work with 180 Health Partners, an organization the helps pregnant women with opiod dependency, using — you guessed it — the Salesforce platform.

Investments are a family affair

Salesforce Ventures' investment thesis isn't the only thing that makes it unique.

It's common at venture capital firms for the entire team to watch a pitch and decide together which startups get offers. At Salesforce Ventures, the whole company pitches in.

"We will have people involved from product, from sales, from finance as well as my team," Somorjai said, "We all will evaluate the investment together."

While the dedicated Salesforce Ventures team is responsible for evaluating the terms of a deal, investments also require an executive sponsor from inside who will say that they like a startup and think the investment is important, Somorjai said.

This is vital, he said, because Salesforce's selling point as an investor is that it has all of the wisdom and resources of a $106 billion software success story.

"We help companies by giving them access to our customer base, access to our leadership and also a lot of critical advice," Somorjai said.

The average check is $2 million, Somorjai said, though it's been known to do much larger deals, such as its $100 million investment in Dropbox on the eve of its IPO.

And while turning a profit is secondary to Salesforce Ventures's goal of building out its community, Somorjai thinks he'll be seeing both happen for some time.

"I don't think we'll stop seeing good returns," he said. "Because we're quite disciplined in the types of companies we invest in, and we're picking the companies where we can help and where we can add value."

The bitcoin world was dealt a big blow when regulators rejected nine exchange-traded funds tied to bitcoin futures on Wednesday.

These include two products from ProShares, two from GraniteShares, and five other proposals from Direxion.

Markets Insider It means the world is still waiting for its first fully regulated bitcoin ETF product. The funds would have tracked bitcoin futures trading on regulated US exchanges, not bitcoin itself.

A bitcoin ETF would likely make it easier for mom-and-pop to tap into the market, which known for its volatility and market manipulation.

Still, it's not clear if the SEC's concerns about such a derivative product will be mollified in 2018.

John Hyland, a early leader of the exchange-traded fund industry, put the odds of a bitcoin ETF going live this year at 20%.

Hyland joined California asset manager Bitwise Asset Management earlier this year to help get their ETF off the ground. Unlike other proposals sent to regulators, Bitwise's ETF would track a basket of cryptos, not just one.

Formerly the chief investment officer of United States Commodity Funds, Hyland is known for pioneering the development of the first crude oil ETF, the first natural gas ETF, and the first copper ETF.

"I was a bit surprised that the SEC bundled them all together instead of waiting until September to give the same response to Direxion and GraniteShares," Hyland said, referring to the regulator's rejection of the nine funds.

Some market observers thought a futures-based ETF would have had a better chance of approval since they trade on regulated markets, but the SEC said in a statement that issuers did not convince the agency that the markets were large enough to withstand manipulation and support a derivative.

Tabb Group

Volumes in bitcoin futures markets have been on the decline since late July, with only $18 million of volume trading in a day.

An ETF based on bitcoin itself also doesn't appear to stand a chance. Richard Johnson, a market structure specialist at Greenwich Associates, said the SEC desires for the market to be properly monitored. But this might be an impossible feat to overcome since much of the volumes in the crypto markets are in overseas markets in Asia.

"If that's what the SEC is saying, that's not going to change any time soon," Johnson said. "Unless an ETF issuer can exclude that type of volume from the contract volume."

Take note bitcoin ETF hopefuls.

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Another US congressperson has disclosed cryptocurrency holdings.

According to a financial filing released Wednesday, the Democrat from Hawaii's 2nd district bought between $1,001 and $15,000 of both ethereum and litecoin in December of 2017. And while it's not clear the exact amounts purchased or the dates, its highly improbable the representative made a profit.

Even if Gabbard bought the digital coins lowest prices of December — $414 for ethereum and $83 for litecoin — she would have been in the red as of the disclosure's August 14 filing date, given the coins' respective prices of $278 and $54.56 on that day. That's a 33% drop for both cryptocurrencies from their lowest prices of December. 

Gabbard's office did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, made headlines for being the first member to disclose crypto holdings last year.

The entire cryptocurrency market has gotten whacked since January, when the craze surrounding the nascent industry was nearing its peak. The flagship bitcoin has declined by 52% this year after hitting a peak of $19,843 shortly after the new year.

Markets Insider

From left, Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee pose in front of their Saturn 1 launch vehicle at Launch Complex 34 at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA

Astronauts may be exceptionally brave, intelligent, and accomplished, but they're not superhuman: they still have to poop and pee when they leave Earth.

But as NASA was working to get the first humans into space in the early 60s, the agency didn't focus much on how astronauts would empty their bladders and evacuate their bowels once they were up there.

Then in 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard — the first person in space — was forced to pee his pants on the launchpad. NASA quickly realized that the lack of planning presented a rather messy problem.

The agency needed a more serious bathroom-break plan, but solutions weren't easy. After the Apollo missions ended in 1975, engineers described defecation and urination as the "bothersome aspects of space travel."

A variety of makeshift solutions have been sent into space, including pee bags, roll on "cuffs," diapers, strappy toilet seats, and $19 million commodes. Contraptions for "going" while weightless have gotten a little more comfortable, and astronauts are now generally good at keeping waste from floating around.

But retired astronaut Peggy Whitson, who logged a record-breaking 665 days in space for NASA, recently said that going to the bathroom in space was her least favorite part of working in zero gravity.

Here's the full story of how astronauts have relieved themselves in space, from 1961 to now:

It's no surprise that Steve Jobs was a jerk.

There have been plenty of accounts over the years that have detailed his cruelty, rudeness, and miserliness to workers, business partners, and even family and friends.

Still, the stories that have come out so far from "Small Fry," the new autobiography from his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs are shocking. Jobs comes across not just as someone who could be self-centered and mean, but someone who was a truly terrible human being.

We've known for years now that Jobs initially denied being Brennan-Jobs' father and didn't start paying child support until after a DNA test proved he was and he was ordered to start paying by a court. We've also known that he denied for years that Apple's Lisa computer, which debuted right before the Macintosh, was named for his daughter — before finally admitting it to her and the world.

But Brennan-Jobs' book adds fresh details on how awful he was to her. He rarely saw her when she was a young child, even after admitting his paternity. While he was avoiding her and avoiding paying child support — despite already having founded and making money at Apple — she and her mother lived in poverty, subsisting on welfare payments, her mother's low-paying jobs, and the charity of others. When he was finally forced to pay child support, he made sure that the case against him was closed days before Apple went public and he became a multimillionaire.

Even after Jobs started paying more attention to Brennan-Jobs, her mother, Chrisann Brennan, apparently felt uncomfortable leaving him with her alone after an incident in which he questioned and teased the then-nine-year-old Brennan-Jobs about her sexual attractions and proclivities.

"We're cold people"

Then, when Brennan-Jobs went to live with him as a teenager, he forbade her from seeing Brennan for six months, even though her mother had been the only constant figure in her life up to then. After moving in with them, Brennan-Jobs told him and her stepmother, Laurene Powell-Jobs, that she felt lonely and asked that they tell her goodnight in the evenings. Instead of acknowledging her feelings and acceding to such a simple request, Powell-Jobs responded, "We're cold people."

"Small Fry" indicates that Laurene Powell-Jobs enabled Steve Jobs' cruelty to his daughter. Steve Jennings / Stringer / Getty Images But there's more. Once, as Jobs groped his wife and pretended to be having sex with her, he demanded that Brennan-Jobs stay in the room, calling it a "family moment." He repeatedly withheld money from her, told her that she would get "nothing" from his wealth — and even refused to install heat in her bedroom.

When she started to become active in her high school, getting involved in clubs and running for student government, Jobs — the one, again, who previously refused to acknowledge his paternity and spent almost no time with her when she was little — got on Brennan-Jobs for not spending more time with the family, telling her, "This isn't working out. You're not succeeding as a member of this family."

At one point, neighbors of the family were so worried about Brennan-Jobs that they helped her move into their house. They also helped her pay for college.

It's bad to treat employees and significant others poorly. But it's really evil to inflict such pain on a child. We knew Jobs was a bully toward many people. Now we know he was one to his own daughter.

Brennan-Jobs comes across as a survivor of abuse

These are only excerpts from the book, which goes on sale September 4, so we don't have the full picture. And of course, they're the recollections of one person, with all the emotional baggage and bias that entails. Powell-Jobs and Jobs' sister have said in a statement that the book "differs dramatically from our memories of those times."

But in her book, Brennan-Jobs brings up these incidents not to condemn Jobs, but to make peace with them and him. She aims to forgive him and move on.

That's her choice and her right. But, as others have pointed out, what she endured was something many people would now consider child abuse — the intentional infliction of emotional cruelty. And in trying to find a way to forgive and understand him, she is reacting similar to other child abuse survivors.

In trying to find a way to excuse her father, Brennan-Jobs is following a long line of people, all of whom are much more culpable than her for his behavior. Generally, the only way to get a bully to back off is to stand up to him and for others to do so on behalf of his targets; in Jobs' case, too few people did.

When it concerned his behavior toward Brennan-Jobs, his wife, Powell-Jobs, clearly didn't stand up to him. When it concerned his behavior to employees and business partners, his colleagues just as obviously didn't.

Jobs had remarkable achievements — and was unbelievably cruel

I don't know how the cosmic balancing stick weighs something as complicated as a person's life, but I do think Brennan-Jobs' book puts the other stories about Jobs, the ones about how he treated his employees, colleagues and partners, in a different light. They make him seem less like a driven leader who was sometimes harsh to achieve his goals and more like a cruel person who succeeded because those around him accommodated and acquiesced to his awfulness.

Jobs is rightly praised for his role in resurrecting Apple. When he took charge, the company was a few months away from bankruptcy. When he left Apple right before his death, it already was the most important consumer technology company in the world and was well on its way to becoming the behemoth it is now. Given the generally poor track record of corporate managers in turning around seemingly hopeless situations, it's quite possible that only Jobs could have saved Apple and put it on that path.

And that's no small achievement. In turning around the company, Jobs saved thousands of jobs and helped to create thousands more. He also made lots of people inside and outside the company very rich.

The positive side of Jobs' ledger also includes his role in creating some of the most influential products of the last 50 years — the iPhone, the Mac, the iPad, the iPod, and the original Apple computers. Maybe similar products could and would have been created without him. But there's no denying that he had a leading role in shaping how billions of people interact with technology, in many ways for the better.

We too often glorify business leaders and ignore their failings

Of course even those achievements are leavened by less laudable ones, such as his overseeing of Apple's outsourcing of thousands of factory jobs overseas and the convoluted contortions it made to avoid paying taxes. He also headed the company and personally benefited when it backdated stock options to make them more valuable, but let other executives take the fall. Oh, and he repeatedly yelled at employees and publicly embarrassed them.

And that's not to mention his antics during his first tenure at Apple, such as how he attempted to undermine then-CEO John Sculley and refused to give stock options to one of Apple's first employees.

In the end, did his business achievements outweigh the cruelty he inflicted on others? I don't know.

I do know that we too often glorify business leaders for their achievements without taking a close look at who they are as human beings and how their actions — both personal and professional — affect those around them and the wider world. I also believe that focus on their accomplishments helps enables their bad behavior.

That certainly seemed to be the case with Steve Jobs.

If you ask Kay Firth-Butterfield about the promise and potential perils of artificial intelligence, she might start talking about toys, dolls, and action figures.

Not the toys of today, necessarily, but those of the future, that will be empowered with AI. Such toys have the promise to be the quintessential educational tools, interacting with kids daily, gaining intimate knowledge about how they think and communicate, and using that information to help them learn.

"Personalized education using AI for kids is going to be a huge game changer," said Firth-Butterfield, who heads the artificial intelligence and machine learning program at the World Economic Forum, said in a conversation last week with Business Insider.

On the other hand, such toys raise a host of issues that policymakers are only starting to get a handle on. The privacy implications alone of potentially having a toy — or a succession of them — collect a child's every utterance from the time they can talk until adulthood are tremendous, she said.

"That is an issue that we really have to solve," she said.

And toys are just one of many areas where society will have to wrestle with both the potential and perils of AI.

The technology promises improvements to everything from industrial processes to agriculture to transportation, Firth-Butterfield said. But it also could lead to a raft of challenges and dangers, including massive job losses in a relatively short period of time, the illegitimate denial of goods or services thanks to flawed or biased algorithms, and citizens' loss of control of what was previously personal data, she said.

Firth-Butterfield works with governments and companies to think through AI issues

In her job with the World Economic Forum, Firth-Butterfield works with representatives of governments, corporations, civil society groups, and academic institutions to work through some of those challenges. The projects she and her group lead are designed to come up with ways to govern AI that will allow countries and companies to reap its benefits while minimizing its harms.

"It's really important that we know that there are all these different tensions, because without addressing them, we are really left with, I suspect, a failing trust in the technology," she said. "What I certainly don't want to see are all the benefits of AI somehow being lost because we haven't put in the ethical underpinnings to help the public know that we're doing something safe."

Firth-Butterfield, who has served as a lawyer and judge in the United Kingdom, has been helping people and companies work through the legal and ethical implications of AI for years now, as a professor, corporate advisor, and consultant. She joined the World Economic Forum last fall.

For her, AI has "enormous" potential. In education, it promises to provide students personalized learning programs that are tailored to their individual needs, learning styles, and aptitude. In industry and business, the technology could help companies significantly reduce the amount of energy they use, she said. Google, she noted, announced two years ago that its DeepMind machine-learning technology helped it reduce the amount of energy it uses to cool the servers in its data centers by 40%.

And in agriculture, AI could be used in tandem with Internet of Things devices to make farmers and agribusinesses more productive and efficient, she said. AI could take the data collected by sensors in fields to help farmers determine how much fertilizers, pesticides, or even just water needed by their crops.

"It's going to enable us to feed more people," she said.

AI has plenty of potential pitfalls

But she's equally concerned with the possible pitfalls of the technology. Algorithms that are flawed in design or in the data they rely on could lead to negative consequences for particular groups of people.

There's a long history of US lenders denying home loans to black people because of the color of their skin, for example. Software designed to automate loans approvals could end up perpetuating that prejudice if that bias is baked into the underlying algorithms, Firth-Butterfield warned. The same is true for discrimination in employment.

Harmful biases have already made themselves evident in artificial-intelligence software and tools. Two years ago, for example, the image recognition software built into Google Photos infamously labeled African-Americans as gorillas. Google also scuttled a video conferencing service intended for employees after the service's face-recognition software failed to detect the faces of people of color, Business Insider reported recently.

"It's really important" that we make sure that we're "not encoding own prejudices and taking them forward with us, because if do that, we will actually stultify the development of the world," she said.

Biased algorithms aren't the only thing she's worried about. AI poses a big threat to employment worldwide.

The world had decades to adapt to the upheavals of the second industrial revolution, the one that led to mass production of everything from steel and automobiles, Firth-Butterfield said. But artificial intelligence is developing and likely will be adopted much more rapidly — and the impact on the job market will likely be felt in short order too, she said.

"We don't have the luxury of a long time to actually even out the effects on job loss with this revolution, because it's happening so quickly," she said.

And then there are the ways that AI could erode privacy and potentially harm kids.

Firth-Butterfield favors standards, not regulation

The best way to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing the benefits is to have multiple stakeholders — governments, corporations, non-profit groups, and more — work through the issues and come up with ways to govern technology, Firth-Butterfield said. That doesn't have to be through laws and formal government regulations, she said. In fact, the better way to regulate AI will be to do it through government and industry standards, she argued.

By setting standards that attempt to minimize harms and take ethics into account, governments in particular can significantly influence the development of artificial intelligence, thanks in part to their huge purchasing power, she said. And setting standards tends to be a lot quicker and more flexible than crafting formal regulations or laws, so it can better respond to changing developments, she said.

"AI's running fast, and we need to run as fast with governance mechanisms," she said.

Those standards will need to focus on minimizing bias and protecting privacy, she said. They'll also need to make clear who or what entities are legally accountable for any harms that take place. And they'll need to ensuring transparency, so citizens and consumers understand how the AI algorithms work and what they're doing.

To be sure, there will be cases where governments will need to put in place formal regulations, Firth-Butterfield acknowledged. Those will likely be when they need to protect the most vulnerable people in society, including kids, the disabled, and the elderly, she said.

Already some countries are ahead of the game in thinking through AI governance issues, Firth-Butterfield said. Among them: Brazil, China, India, and the United Kingdom.

"There are a number of countries that are already stepping up to the plate," she said.

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