Amazon has argued that the voice of Alexa, the artificial intelligence assistant used in its range of Echo speakers, has First Amendment rights. The company is fighting an order to hand over recordings from an Amazon Echo used by James Andrew Bates, who is on trial for allegedly murdering his friend Victor Collins in Arkansas in November 2015. Amazon has filed a 90-page document, which is available to read on Forbes, contesting the warrant demanding the audio covering the 48-hour period from 21-22 November 2015. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a ...

SpaceX's Dragon cargo ship docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, a day after a GPS problem prevented the capsule from coming too close. The SpaceX Dragon capsule flying the CRS-10 cargo resupply mission was captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm at 5:44 a.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017. MELBOURNE, Fla. -- A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying nearly 5,500 pounds of supplies and science experiments arrived safely at the International Space Station early Thursday, a day later than planned after an aborted rendezvous Wednesday. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet steered a 58-foot robotic arm to snare the unmanned Dragon at 5:44 p.m. EST, as the two spacecraft flew 250 miles above northwestern Australia. "Looks like we got a great capture," crewmate and Expedition 50 commander Shane Kimbrough radioed to flight controllers in Houston.

Last September, a Google offshoot called Jigsaw declared war on trolls, launching a project to defeat online harassment using machine learning. Now, the team is opening up that troll-fighting system to the world. On Thursday, Jigsaw and its partners on Google's Counter Abuse Technology Team released a new piece of code called Perspective, an API that gives any developer access to the anti-harassment tools that Jigsaw has worked on for over a year. Part of the team's broader Conversation AI initiative, Perspective uses machine learning to automatically detect insults, harassment, and abusive speech online. Enter a sentence into its interface, and Jigsaw says its AI can immediately spit out an assessment of the phrase's "toxicity" more accurately than any keyword blacklist, and faster than any human moderator.

Customers trying to delete their Uber account in light of former employee Susan Fowler's sexual harassment allegations have started receiving a notification referencing the incident. The taxi-hailing app company is launching an "urgent investigation" into the workplace issues raised by Ms Fowler, and has hired former US President Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder to lead it. The claims have prompted the latest in a series of backlashes against Uber, with customers urging users to delete their accounts. "Everyone at Uber is deeply hurting after reading Susan Fowler's blog post," reads a message seen by Mashable, which is being sent to users in the process of cutting their ties with Uber. "What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in."

Poblete demanded the immediate and unconditional release of Zakka, a Lebanese computer expert whose organization previously did contract work for the U.S. government, and all other Westerners held by Iran.

Many people worry that robots will replace human jobs, but Bill Gates has a solution: a robot tax. As robots begin to infiltrate the workforce, why shouldn't they be taxed just as humans are? In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates argued that in order to offset job losses due to automation, governments should tax companies that use robots. "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed, and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things," Gates said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level."

With no federal regulations for self-driving cars in place, states are assuming responsibility for ensuring the benefits of the technology can be reaped without sacrificing safety. Federal regulators provided safety guidance to states and automakers last year, but stopped short of issuing binding rules. Key members of Congress say they also are exploring legislation. Eight states have self-driving car laws, and bills have been introduced in 20 states this year, according to tracking by Volvo.

MEMPHIS -- Amid the confusion and pandemonium that would follow a major earthquake, Memphis-area emergency-response officials plan to deploy drones to check for collapsed buildings and bridges, locate fires and guide rescue crews. Toward that end, the Central United States Earthquake Consortium, a Memphis-based agency charged with helping prepare an eight-state region for temblors on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, has begun developing a network of licensed drone pilots to aid in quake-response efforts. This week, CUSEC will convene an initial meeting of prospective participants. "We're going to use their insights into determining how to build this (network)," said Jim Wilkinson, executive director of CUSEC. The use of drones following disasters is not new.

The rapidity of recent Chinese advances in artificial intelligence indicates that the country is capable of keeping pace with, or perhaps even overtaking, the United States in this critical emerging technology. The successes of major Chinese technology companies, notably Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group and Tencent Holding Ltd.--and even a number of start-ups--have demonstrated the dynamism of these private-sector efforts in artificial intelligence. From speech recognition to self-driving cars, Chinese research is cutting edge. Although the military dimension of China's progress in artificial intelligence has remained relatively opaque, there is also relevant research occurring in the People's Liberation Army research institutes and the Chinese defense industry. Evidently, the PLA recognizes the disruptive potential of the varied military applications of artificial intelligence, from unmanned weapons systems to command and control.

A week hasn't even passed since the inauguration, but television news is saturated with the flurry of activity from President Donald Trump's administration. Trump, via Twitter, promised to launch an investigation into illegal voting and threatened to "send in the Feds" if Chicago police can't fix the "carnage." And that was just between Tuesday and Wednesday. This heightened scrutiny compelled the Internet Archive, a repository of everything posted on the web, to launch its Trump Archive in early January. You, perhaps, digitally time-traveled with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, or checked out free books, movies and software. The Trump Archive, which draws content from The Internet Archive's TV News Archive, includes more than 520 hours of televised Trump speeches, interviews, debates and other broadcasts tracing back to 2009.