It’s nearly impossible to avoid the ‘First Contact’ plots if you read a lot of science fiction, and I’ve read a lot of science fiction. Whether it’s aliens or artificial intelligence (AI), the genre is well explored, and often by authors who have academic expertise.
The impact of specific pieces of writing on the field of AI isn’t as clear to me, as the impact of books like ‘Snow Crash’ and ‘Neuromancer’ are on gaming, social networks and virtual reality. I’m sure that AI researcher’s influences will become clear in the near term.
In the probably fortunate absence of alien contact, it is emergent AI efforts that we can compare to those of their fictional counterparts. Apart from startups offering diary management, IBM’s Watson and a few other examples, most people’s initial experience of an AI-like experience will be with Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana or Google’s unimaginatively named ‘Google’.
The sentient ‘Minds’ of Iain M Bank’s Culture books are capable of holding conversations concurrently with more than millions of other intelligences, human or otherwise. To someone of our species and rather more mundane abilities, that sounds like it would rather a lot to handle — but it is immediately possible to anthropomorphize the experience of, say, Siri being similar.
Except it isn’t.
Siri, for example, is actually surprisingly hard to interact with. You can do it through the very specific voice-based user experience, and that’s it. It doesn’t work well in noisy places and it can’t be used discreetly. It also can’t be used in low bandwidth network conditions.
When Apple announced Siri support for macOS I wondered if we’d get the ability to interact with Siri using the keyboard. Spoiler: we didn’t.
I’ve also wondered why we have to have an entirely separate voice interface, when FaceTime would work just fine — maybe because it would then be difficult to launch another call using Siri’s abilities.
At the very least, we should be able to send an iMessage to Siri — which would work well in low bandwidth conditions and probably be easier to parse than voice, almost certainly working better in noisy environments.
So Apple: here’s an idea, for free: the first contact in any Apple product’s Address Book should be Siri.
