It's a reminder of how creepy a world full of devices that blur the line between life and objects could be, but there's also something appealing about connecting more closely to the things we build. Far more insightful people than me have explored these issues, from Mary Shelley to Phillip K. Dick, but the aspect that has fascinated me most is how computers understand us. We live in a world where our machines are wonderful at showing us near-photorealistic scenes in real time, and can even talk to us in convincing voices. Up until recently though, they've not been able to make sense of images or audio that are given to them as inputs. We've been able to synthesize voices for decades, but speech recognition has only really started working well in the last few years.

By Kashmir Hill Floyd Abrams, one of the most prominent First Amendment lawyers in the country, has a new client: the facial recognition company Clearview AI. Litigation against the startup "has the potential of leading to a major decision about the interrelationship between privacy claims and First Amendment defenses in the 21st century," Abrams said in a phone interview. He said the underlying legal questions could one day reach the Supreme Court. Clearview AI has scraped billions of photos from the internet, including from platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, and sells access to the resulting database to law enforcement agencies. When an officer uploads a photo or a video image containing a person's face, the app tries to match the likeness and provides other photos of that person that can be found online.