Authorities investigating the death of an Arkansas man whose body was found in a hot tub want to expand the probe to include a new kind of evidence: any comments overheard by the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker. Amazon said it objects to "overbroad" requests as a matter of practice, but prosecutors insist their idea is rooted in a legal precedent that's "as old as Methuselah." The issue emerged in the slaying of Victor Collins, who was found floating face-up last year in the hot tub at a friend's home in Bentonville, about 150 miles northwest of Little Rock. The friend, James Andrew Bates, was later charged with murder. Prosecutors have asked the court to force Amazon to provide data from the Echo that could reveal more clues about the night of Nov. 22, 2015, when Collins was apparently strangled and drowned. Benton County Prosecuting Attorney Nathan Smith said yesterday that he has no idea if the device recorded anything related to the death.

Apple has been doomed for decades, if the steady stream of headlines about the company, its stock price, and its product lineup are to be believed. If The Macalope has taught us anything, it's that the Apple deathwatch business is a brisk (and bizarre) one. The truth is much more complex. But by any measure, 2016 was a particularly tough year for Apple. The company endured a bitter legal fight with the FBI, saw its first revenue decline in more than a decade, and faced backlash over hardware tweaks in its upgraded flagship products: the iPhone 7's lack of a 3.5mm audio jack and the overhauled MacBook Pro's less-than-pro specs for a decidedly pro price.

FILE - This July 29, 2015, file photo shows Amazon's Echo speaker, which responds to voice commands, in New York. A prosecutor investigating the death of a man whose body was found in a hot tub wants to expand the probe to include a potential new kind of evidence: the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker. Amazon has called the request "overbroad or otherwise inappropriate." FILE - This July 29, 2015, file photo shows Amazon's Echo speaker, which responds to voice commands, in New York. A prosecutor investigating the death of a man whose body was found in a hot tub wants to expand the probe to include a potential new kind of evidence: the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker.

MIAMI – Amazon's connected personal assistant Alexa may have witnessed a murder. Investigators in Arkansas recovered the Amazon Echo speaker infused with artificial intelligence from a murder scene, and want to know what Alexa heard, according to lawyers on both sides. The case centers around Victor Collins, 47, who was found strangled in November 2015 in a bathtub of the Bentonville home of James Bates, who is accused of the crime. In the investigation, an officer found an Amazon Echo device at Bates's house -- the small cylinder-shaped speaker that responds to voice commands under the name "Alexa." Prosecutors have obtained a search warrant that would require Amazon to release any relevant data from the device, according to a statement from Benton County prosecutor Nathan Smith.

As seen in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it is hard not to feel excited about machine learning. First, it empowers machines to teach themselves the tasks that humans can perform but find difficult to "teach" a computer via conventional coding (e.g. Secondly, it enables computers to perform tasks that far exceed human abilities, like analysing terabytes of data at lightning speed to unearth hidden patterns and make sense of them. But it is also hard not to feel some unease about the prospect of self-improving computer systems with increasingly human-like and super-human aptitudes, whether it is the threat of mass unemployment, the erosion of privacy, or simply the inability to understand, validate and trust the technologies that will increasingly impact our lives. These problems that artificial intelligence (AI) is throwing back at us are complex and multifaceted, and to tackle them requires concerted endeavours by our technologists, entrepreneurs, lawmakers and thinkers from all fields and walks of life. It will be a test of humankind's collective wisdom to ensure that our social institutions keep up with our technological progress. The advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) illustrates the wide-ranging economic, legal and ethical questions that new technologies raise. AVs are already roaming the streets and conveying passengers in parts of the world, and many more are expected to hit the roads over the next five years as tech companies like Google, Baidu and Lyft race against incumbent automakers to make reliable and affordable self-driving cars. This is likely to dramatically alter the economics of transportation, from ownership rate to utilisation rate. It is estimated that in the US and the UK our cars on average are being driven just 5% of the time and they spend the remaining 95% in a garage or a car park.[1] That ratio may well be reversed if the availability of door-to-door transport is no longer linked to the availability of human drivers.

Past civilizations built grand libraries to organize the world's knowledge. These repositories of information focused on cataloging, aggregating, organizing and making information accessible so that others could focus on learning and creating new knowledge. AI and machine learning systems also need repositories of information from which to learn -- and right now everyone is building their own. If different groups of people focus on organizing data versus building AI, the progress of intelligent computers will massively accelerate. Despite all the progress in machine learning (ML), most of our computers (and their applications) leave much to be desired.

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FILE - This July 29, 2015, file photo shows Amazon's Echo speaker, which responds to voice commands, in New York. A prosecutor investigating the death of a man whose body was found in a hot tub wants to expand the probe to include a potential new kind of evidence: the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker. Amazon has called the request "overbroad or otherwise inappropriate."

A Bentonville murder case caught the attention of privacy advocates Tuesday (Dec. Bentonville investigators found the Amazon Echo at the home of James Andrew Bates, 31, who was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder in February in connection to the death of Victor Collins, according to the search warrant affidavit. Police found Collins' body in Bates' hot tub Nov. 2015 and a medical examiner ruled there had likely been a fight and Collins died from strangulation and drowning, according to a probable cause affidavit. Collins' body had cuts and bruises and investigators found blood in the hot tub, the affidavit states. After noticing the Echo in Bates' kitchen, investigators requested a search warrant for all the audio recordings and data from the device, according to court records.

When police responded to a home in Bentonville, Ark., one Sunday morning in November 2015, they discovered Victor Collins' dead body in the backyard. Police records describe a grim scene: Collins' body was floating face up in a hot tub, his left eye and lips dark and swollen. The resident who had called 911, James A. Bates, told police that he and a few work buddies, including Collins, had stayed up the night before watching football and drinking. Bates agreed to let two of them crash at his house, then went to bed, he told police. Shortly after he awoke, he said, he spotted Collins' lifeless body in the spa.