Let’s say you’re speaking to someone (or something)
who you can’t see because they are in another room. You say, “Are you excited
for your upcoming birthday?” and you hear back, “Yes, I can’t wait because all
of my friends will be there!” You go to see who you’re talking to and you find
out that you’re talking to your smartphone! Is this real artificial
intelligence? Far from it.
Although Siri is able to respond to us like a real
human being, its responses are canned because it recognizes patterns in your
speech and spits out information it was designed to say. Because Siri is a
cloud service, this means that in the future, Apple engineers will be able to
come up with so many canned responses, that your iPhone, on the outside, will
start to feel like a real person.
Real artificial intelligence, however, is when a
computer is able to demonstrate traits such as problem solving, reasoning,
learning, etc. Artificial intelligence is when a computer actually understands
your questions or comments rather than generating scripted output, when it
actually has feelings rather than code that guide its responses. In short,
artificial intelligence is when the computer’s actions no longer require any human
scripted input, when, for example, a group of robots, released into the wild,
could work and evolve together, like a real human community would. Although
“real” robots are still the stuff of science fiction, Siri, with enough canned
responses, can act like one. And, for most people, whether or not there is
something “intelligent” about Siri is irrelevant if it responds the way a real
human would.
Siri is a cloud service, which means its users
won’t have to wait for a software update from Apple in order to take advantage
of its increasing amount of scripted responses. Apple reportedly bought the
technology behind Siri for over $200 million, which was originally a 5-year
project that was funded by the United States Department of Defense and worked
on by institutions such as Stanford, CMU, MIT, and Berkeley. After Apple bought
the Siri company, it worked on perfecting its technology, 2 years before
releasing it to the public. The overwhelmingly positive reviews of its
assistant and Apple’s significant investment in AI suggests that Apple will,
once again, have the first mover advantage of a technology, which everybody
wants, giving it a significant competitive advantage over its rivals.
