From Allan French
“What is the meaning of life?”
“I don’t know. But I think there’s an app for that.”
According to New Scientist (22 October, p 25) this is an actual conversation with the Apple iPhone 4S’s voice-based virtual assistant Siri.
I guess that’s progress. In the late 1980s, I was helping pack up kit at a technology trade show, specifically an AI-based natural language processor. Before I shut the system down, I typed in: “What is the meaning of life?” The system responded: “Life not found.”
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