Daisy, Daisy
“Uh, tell Jon I’m running late!” “Here’s your message to Jon, are you ready to send it?” “Yeah, that’s perfect. Also, I have to meet Sarah at 5 pm tomorrow and again the week after. “Okay, I’ve scheduled your meeting, note that you have another meeting that overlaps. Do you want me to schedule it anyways?” “Oh, shit, move dinner with Joshua to 6:30.” “Watch your language, Blake… I’ve moved dinner with Joshua to 6:30 pm.” “Thank you, Siri.” “Your wish is my command.”
On Monday, October 24th, John McCarthy, the father of Artificial Intelligence, died. McCarthy coined AI, in 1956, as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” At this point, his idea was purely skeptical; nonetheless, science and fear-inspired science fiction split apart to create distinct public impressions of conscious machines. In a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing proposed the question, “Can machines think?” He answered the quintessential question by developing a test in which a human blindly interacts with two users—one human, one computer—and has to determine which has real intelligence. If a machine can convince a human it’s genuine, then it is intelligent.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick portrayed humanity’s impending irrelevance in the cult classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000, the onboard computer of Discovery One, a shiprunning an interplanetary mission to Jupiter, makes the decision to terminate all humans aboard to preserve the integrity of the mission—homicidal justice for the betterment of a cause.
These impressions combined and technology began to terrify people. While computer manufactures were striving to develop technology to aid and benefit human life, the populace saw cruel, dark, electric machines with the intent to replace humans. It seemed we were doomed to become inconsequential automatons subject to computational will.
The year 2001 came and passed—technology still deferred to humans. Talking willful robots hadn’t run us out yet. But, the seeds of such a future had taken root years prior. Mirroring human intelligence and placing it in silicon is an monstrous task. On October 14th, Apple Computer’s iPhone 4S launched with a virtual assistant named Siri, an intelligent machine for the mass consumer market. Siri is the culmination of over 40 years of research and development.
Starting in 1966, DARPA funded SRI International to develop “computer capabilities for intelligent behavior in complex situations.” Since the 1960s, SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center has formed a super-team of the most highly trained professionals in the AI field. (Including research teams from Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford University.) They broke down seemingly insurmountable barriers in the process of creating a entity that could pass the Turing test and fool a human. But, the R&D theory and technology timeline never matched. In previous prototypes, there were too many break points.
Now, the time is ripe. Processing power, connectivity and AI development intersected and Siri was born. While dictating to devices isn’t new—the barrier of voice to text recognition had previously been broken by Nuance Communications—communicating with technology required clean syntax and perfect oratorical enunciation. Siri blends voice recognition with a natural language interface, personal context awareness, and an ecosystem for service delegation. When prompted, Siri analyzes conversation based on location, task, time and dialog. This allows it to complete tasks, interact, and learn without skipping a beat. You talk to it as you would a friend, and it responds just the same.
Verbal dialogue is the fourth, most human, interface with technology. We’ve progressed from typing, to clicking, to touching, and now, to speaking. In no way do I predict speaking negating the other interfaces, but rather note it as an approach to a holistic human model for interaction. We write, read, touch, talk and listen to each other; now, our devices can too.
Siri is a far-from-perfect starting point. In over a week of use, I’ve seen its limitations and triumphs grow clear. Some tasks are better completed without voice. Some tasks, it is incapable of returning the correct result. A lot of this has to do with the way the service sends information back and forth from the ecosystem of knowledge (where Siri’s answers are coming from). As the technology develops, more services will be allowed into Apple’s walled off garden and Siri’s usefulness will take off at an astronomical rate.
While Artificial Intelligence may not be entirely here yet, an iota of sophisticated machine intelligence is. Now that a droplet of the technology exists in the consumer market, its ripples will quickly proliferate. After 40 years of research and development, we now have the ability to trick ourselves, if only for a moment, to believe mankind is not the only intelligent being out there. It’s alien technology from our imagined future, descended on earth, and rooted in silicon. It’s interaction with machines, as man interacts with one another. And most importantly, it’s just the beginning of a timeline where man and machine are wed on a human playing field. All technology is singing—terrified or excited, ready or not—”give me your answer, do.”
