Tag Archives: Siri

AIs and ICBMs

You know something very creepy is going on when robots armed with artificial intelligence (AI) engage in conversations about nuclear war and inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM). This scene could be straight out of a William Gibson novel.

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Video: The BINA48 robot, created by Martine Rothblatt and Hanson Robotics, has a conversation with Siri. Courtesy of ars technica.

Post-Siri Relationships

siri

What are we to make of a world when software-driven intelligent agents, artificial intelligence and language processing capabilities combine to deliver a human experience? After all, what does it really mean to be human and can a machine be sentient? We should all be pondering such weighty issues, since this emerging reality may well happen within our lifetimes.

From Technology Review:

In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system who christens herself Samantha.

Samantha lies far beyond the faux “artificial intelligence” of Google Now or Siri: she is as fully and unambiguously conscious as any human. The film’s director and writer, Spike Jonze, employs this premise for limited and prosaic ends, so the film limps along in an uncanny valley, neither believable as near-future reality nor philosophically daring enough to merit suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, Her raises questions about how humans might relate to computers. Twombly is suffering a painful separation from his wife; can Samantha make him feel better?

Samantha’s self-awareness does not echo real-world trends for automated assistants, which are heading in a very different direction. Making personal assistants chatty, let alone flirtatious, would be a huge waste of resources, and most people would find them as irritating as the infamous Microsoft Clippy.

But it doesn’t necessarily follow that these qualities would be unwelcome in a different context. When dementia sufferers in nursing homes are invited to bond with robot seal pups, and a growing list of psychiatric conditions are being addressed with automated dialogues and therapy sessions, it can only be a matter of time before someone tries to create an app that helps people overcome ordinary loneliness. Suppose we do reach the point where it’s possible to feel genuinely engaged by repartee with a piece of software. What would that mean for the human participants?

Perhaps this prospect sounds absurd or repugnant. But some people already take comfort from immersion in the lives of fictional characters. And much as I wince when I hear someone say that “my best friend growing up was Elizabeth Bennet,” no one would treat it as evidence of psychotic delusion. Over the last two centuries, the mainstream perceptions of novel reading have traversed a full spectrum: once seen as a threat to public morality, it has become a badge of empathy and emotional sophistication. It’s rare now to hear claims that fiction is sapping its readers of time, energy, and emotional resources that they ought to be devoting to actual human relationships.

Of course, characters in Jane Austen novels cannot banter with the reader—and it’s another question whether it would be a travesty if they could—but what I’m envisaging are not characters from fiction “brought to life,” or even characters in a game world who can conduct more realistic dialogue with human players. A software interlocutor—an “SI”—would require some kind of invented back story and an ongoing “life” of its own, but these elements need not have been chosen as part of any great dramatic arc. Gripping as it is to watch an egotistical drug baron in a death spiral, or Raskolnikov dragged unwillingly toward his creator’s idea of redemption, the ideal SI would be more like a pen pal, living an ordinary life untouched by grand authorial schemes but ready to discuss anything, from the mundane to the metaphysical.

There are some obvious pitfalls to be avoided. It would be disastrous if the user really fell for the illusion of personhood, but then, most of us manage to keep the distinction clear in other forms of fiction. An SI that could be used to rehearse pathological fantasies of abusive relationships would be a poisonous thing—but conversely, one that stood its ground against attempts to manipulate or cower it might even do some good.

The art of conversation, of listening attentively and weighing each response, is not a universal gift, any more than any other skill. If it becomes possible to hone one’s conversational skills with a computer—discovering your strengths and weaknesses while enjoying a chat with a character that is no less interesting for failing to exist—that might well lead to better conversations with fellow humans.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Siri icon. Courtesy of Cult of Mac / Apple.

A Serious Conversation with Siri

Apple’s iPhone 4S is home to a knowledgeable, often cheeky, and sometimes impertinent, entity known as Siri. It’s day job is as voice-activated personal assistant.

According to Apple, Siri is:

… the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. It allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. But Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands. Siri understands your natural speech, and it asks you questions if it needs more information to complete a task.

It knows what you mean.

Siri not only understands what you say, it’s smart enough to know what you mean. So when you ask “Any good burger joints around here?” Siri will reply “I found a number of burger restaurants near you.” Then you can say “Hmm. How about tacos?” Siri remembers that you just asked about restaurants, so it will look for Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood. And Siri is proactive, so it will question you until it finds what you’re looking for.

Yet in reality, Siri has taken on an expanded role that encompasses comedian, philosopher, companion and polymath mentor. While not as conflicted and menacing as Hal, the soft-spoken super-computer, in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Siri’s musings suggest the machinations of a higher intelligence calmly toying with its human subjects.

Siri is very much the product of its very human, and talented, software and hardware engineers, unless, that is, Apple has made earth-moving strides in artificial intelligence (AI) and Siri has become sentient. In fact, Siri was a spin-out effort in 2007 from SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center prior to Apple’s acquisition in April 2010.

Yet, ask Siri a slew of esoteric questions and you’re likely to get some very nuanced answers, many of which will leave you scratching your head or laughing out loud. In fact, several websites have already sprung up to catalog Siri’s musings. A sample of human questions and Siri’s answers below:

Human: “I need to hide a body”.
Siri: What kind of place are you looking for? Reservoirs, Metal Foundries, Mines, Dumps, Swamps…

Human: “I am sleepy”.
Siri: I hope you’re not driving.

Human: “Tell me a joke”.
Siri: Siri answers to this question vary: (1) Two iPhones walk into a bar… I forget the rest; (2) I can’t. I always forget the punch line.

Human: “My wife wants a divorce because of you”.
Siri: I found a number of divorce lawyers, some of them are not far from you.

Human: “Do you know HAL 9000?”.
Siri: Everyone knows what happened to HAL. I’d rather not talk about it.

Human: “What two things are infinite?”.
Siri: The universe and human stupidity… and I’m not sure about the universe.

For more conversations courtesy of Siri check out the following websites: LifeWithSiri, SiriFunny, and Siri-isms.

 

[div class=attrib]Image: HAL9000. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]