MURDER, HE SPOKE: Devices like Amazon's EchO and GoogIe's Home are always listening. 十 み vi01e nt struggle with an intrud e r, but the Fitbit worn by the wife showe d she was walking around the house at the time her husband claimed they were fighting 0 代 an attack. Based on this new information, pro se cutors charge d the husband, Richard Dab ate , with murde r, in ApriI. ThiS trend iS revving up, because smart devices are mcreasingly a part Ofour lives. We re wearmg Apple Watches and Nike + smart shoes that can track our movements, and Snap Spectacles that can take videos Of What we see. ln our homes, we re installing connecte d C ameras, our smart TVs can tell ifwe're watching, and AI assistants like the Ech0 or Google Home listen t0 what we re saying. Think 0f all the clues these things could gather about a crime. Samsung even sells a Family Hub smart refrigerator that takes and analyzes photos 0f what's inside. lt might have proactively called the cops on Jeffrey Dahmer. SO much more IS coming. Amazon one-upped its EchO by introducing the Amazon LOOk, which has a camera SO Amazon S Al can now gather visual information about you. The initial idea is that you can ask LOOk tO take phOtOS Of what you wear SO it can get a sense Ofyour style and recommend clothes t0 buy (from Amazon, as you might expect). The device also captures everything in the background, like maybe that loaded gun on the dresser behind you. I met recently with a startup c alled Lighthous e , which is introducing a device similar tO LO Ok but is built with the kind of 3-D sensing technology that's helping self-driving cars navigate busy streets. Unlike L00k, Lighthouse is always on and watching, and the AI can learn the difference between members of a household and can dis- cern What'S going on in the roor . For instance, while in a bar with the Lighthouse executives, Chief Marketing Offcer Jessica Gilmartin, wh0 has a Lighthouse in her home, pulled out her phone and showed me a demo. She asked, by spe aking intO her phone , t0 se e mage s 0f her kids running ・ Sure enough, the s oftware showed vide 0 0f each time her kids ran up the stairs. The company is pitching the product as a home mon- itor, but it's easy tO see hOW detectives investigat- ing a murde r could ask Lighthouse t0 show them all images 0 for instance, someone swinging a fireplace poker at someone else's head. Another new company, Sunflower Labs, is startmg tO sell a drone-based 'Home Awareness System. You get a little camera-armed drone that resides ⅲ a nest outside your house and a couple 0f sensors you plant in yo lawn. If the sensors detect some stranger peekmg in your windows, the system can dispense the drone tO go take a look. That alone would scare the crap out ofmost NEWSWEEK 49 MAY26 , 2017 intruders, which will eventually make for an awe- some compilation video on YouTube. But' this can prOV1de even more data for SOlvers. On a more industriallevel, Axon' the company that makes Tasers, is making a huge push intO crme-solving AI. lts approach seems brilliant. The company is offering free body cameras t0 any police department, because Axon knows the gold is in the data it will get back. The cameras can stream video back tO Axon S servers, where that data can teach the AI software about police actions and crime scenes. Axon CEO Rick Smith described the strategy t0 the blog PoliceOne this way: lmagine having one person in your agency who would watch every single one of your vid- eos—and remember everything they saw—and then be able t0 process that and give you the insight intO what cnmes you could solve, what problems you could deal with. Based on what we re seeing in the artificial intelligence space, that could be within five tO seven years. lfyou put it all together, we're clearly heading toward a time when AI software can learn about criminal behavior and apply what it knows t0 DATA FROM A FITBIT HELPED CRACK A MURDER CASE. data from the many devices that are going tO monitor our lives. While it might take a human detective months tO sort through a data set, Al can dO it in a flash and find the tiniest clues in LOOk videos or drone alerts or refrigerator con- tents that most people would miss. The more our world gets digitized and turned into data, the better AI will be at solving crimes. "The crime scene Of tomorrow IS gomg tO be the internet Of things,' concludes Scotland Yard's Mark St0kes ln an intervlew with T んビ Times ofLondon. NOW there is this little catch called privacy, which is something the companies and the courts are going tO have tO work out. Like Ama- zon in that Arkansas case, most compames are reluctant tO hand over user data. But investiga- tors are going tO ask for it, and courts are likely tO grant warrants.We all have t0 know the trade-off we re making whe n we bring the s e gadgets into our homes or strap them on. Basically, we re VO ト untarily cre ating a surveillance state. Just don't murder any early adopters. lt won't turn out well. ロ