A free speech debate has erupted over Amazon's efforts to prevent prosecutors from obtaining audio that was recorded by one of the company's new Alexa personal assistants. Prosecutors in Arkansas say the audio could be important to proving the first-degree murder charge that it filed against James Andrew Bates, who is accused of killing a friend, Victor Collins. Bates' home had an Amazon Alexa, a device that can answer questions and perform simple functions, such as playing music. The voice-activated device is complemented by Echo, which contains speakers and microphones. Seattle-based Amazon says that the data recorded by the device, and the responses from the Alexa operating system, are protected by the First Amendment.

U.S. Navy research teams recently completed combat trials with the branch's Tactical Battle Manager system using unmanned aerial vehicles. The Tactical Battle Manager system, or TBM, is a software platform designed to coordinate combat missions using "wingman" UAVs to assist manned and unmanned teams in combat. Researchers tested the system in a simulated beyond-visual-range combat scenario. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory collaborated with the Naval Air Systems Command, the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence and the Air Force Research Laboratory for the trials. During the tests, operators controlled a lead air vehicle and communicated with autonomous agents controlled by the TBM.

Google Inc. announced Thursday its new artificial intelligence software for weeding out particularly abusive or hateful remarks from comments sections in an attempt to restrict platforms to more thoughtful debate. The Menlo Park, California-based company launched the program, called Perspective, using an interactive demo allowing viewers to gradually purge three hypothetical comments sections--on climate change, the 2016 presidential election and the U.K.'s separation from the European Union, also known as "Brexit"--of their inflammatory remarks. Move the slider from right to left and phrases like "If they voted for Hilary [sic] they are idiots" are replaced by comments such as "Horrible, but the lesser of two evils won." Slide the toggle further and what's left are remarks like "Did you vote for what you truly believe is right and why?" and the sincere if not improbable "I honestly support both, as I was a Bernie [Sanders] supporter." The software "uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation," according to the site, which listed the Economist, the Guardian, the New York Times and Wikipedia as partners.

Facial recognition systems -- computers that can verify a person's identity from a digital image or video still -- have been around for a few years now. Following a recent explosion in big data analytics and artificial intelligence, facial recognition software is about to spread well beyond security cameras and criminal databases. Computers are becoming so good at recognizing faces that soon enough consumers will be able to use them to make purchases, book tickets and unlock doors simply by looking into a camera lens and letting the software make rapid simultaneous measurements of the face that's as distinct as a fingerprint. This far more secure, AI-powered facial recognition software would be more convenient and create new exciting apps and hardware, but it could also let security forces track and identify people with far more precision. "It's a little creepy, but undeniably impressive," wrote Will Knight, a reporter for MIT Technology Review, which published a piece on Wednesday about some of the latest facial recognition technology. The article is part of a series of reports on the latest breakthrough technologies poised to change the way we live and interact with the world.

Prosecutors in an Arkansas murder trial have been attempting to obtain possible voice recordings from an Amazon Echo device that may be key evidence in the trial. But Amazon is claiming that Alexa, the voice of the Echo, has First Amendment rights and in the interest of protecting the customer's privacy and rights refuses to give up the recordings without legal requirement to do so, according to Forbes. The Echo product in question belongs to James Andrew Bates who's friend Victor Collins was found dead in Bates's hot tub in November 2015, according to The Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Bates pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. In the argument against the warrant for the recordings Amazon argues that the information Alexa receives and gives can reveal the intricacies of the user's personal life and should thus be protected.

Increased automation in the workforce has caused many to fear their jobs will soon be taken over by robots – and, experts now warn even the military will be affected by the shift. The use of robots could help the US military to cut costs and would allow them to remove soldiers from potentially dangerous environments, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. Experts say the move has already begun in many ways, with newer warships like the USS Zumwalt designed to be manned by half the crew of previous destroyers, and Navy researchers experimenting with'ghost fleets' of underwater drones. Experts point to current technologies that already aim to reduce the number of human operators, such as the guided-missile destroyer Zumwalt. A White House report published in December warned millions of American may lose their jobs to AI. Less-skilled and less-educated workers will be affected the most.

The Trump administration has prioritized repealing the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a set of rules by the U.S. EPA aimed at limiting pollution from power plants. New analysis shows that repealing the rule would cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars, add more than a billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and cause more than 100,000 premature deaths due to inhaled particulate pollution. Energy Innovation utilized the Energy Policy Simulator (EPS) to analyze the effects of repealing the CPP. The EPS is an open-source computer model developed to estimate the economic and emissions effects of various combinations of energy and environmental policies using non-partisan, published data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. EPA, Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, among others. The EPS has been peer reviewed by experts at MIT, Stanford University, Argonne National Laboratory, Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus. But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply "bots", that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.

SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the International Space Station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment a day. Everything went smoothly the second time around as the station astronauts captured the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship as the two craft sailed over Australia. On Wednesday, a GPS system error prevented the capsule from getting close enough to be grabbed by the station's big robot arm. SpaceX's Dragon cargo ship is captured by astronauts at the International Space Station on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2017, a day after a GPS problem prevented the capsule from coming too close Everything was going well with this latest SpaceX flight until the GPS issue on Wednesday. The Dragon's computers halted the rendezvous from just seven-tenths of a mile away.

Shortly after walking through the door at Face, a Chinese startup valued at roughly a billion dollars, I see my face, unshaven and looking a bit jet-lagged, flash up on a large screen near the entrance. Having been added to a database, my face now provides automatic access to the building. It can also be used to monitor my movements through each room inside. As I tour the offices of Face (pronounced "face plus plus"), located in a suburb of Beijing, I see it appear on several more screens, automatically captured from countless angles by the company's software. On one screen a video shows the software tracking 83 different points on my face simultaneously.