Apple's new iPhone 4S has met with record sales, topping the release of the iPhone 4 last year. The iPhone 4 debuted with 1.7 million units sold. The iPhone 4S is projected to sell anywhere between 2 and 4 million units by the end of this weekend.
With an improved camera and a faster chip, the iPhone 4S easily outpaces its predecessor as well as most of its competitors.
Even Samsung's Galaxy SII can't compete with the remarkable voice recognition software included on the new iPhone: Siri.
Siri is smart voice recognition software, capable of intuitively answering a wide array of questions from iPhone users. But Alexis Madrigal says it's more than that:
The genius of Siri is to combine the new type of information bot with the old type of human-helper bot. Instead of patterning Siri on a humanoid body, Apple used a human archetype -- the secretary or assistant. To do so, Apple gave Siri a voice and a set of skills that seem designed to make everyone feel like Don Draper. Siri listens to you and does what you say. "Take this down, Siri... Remind me to buy Helena flowers!" And if early reviews are any indication, the disembodied robot could be the next big thing in how we interact with our computers.
The way we interact with technology is changing rapidly. Recently, I.B.M. super-computer "Watson" beat its human competitors on Jeopardy. The intuitive way that Siri answers questions on the iPhone 4S is certainly reminiscent of Watson's ability to quickly parse through enormous amounts of data on the quiz show. How long before Watson is in our pocket, and Siri is just a thing of the past?
Of course, as Alexis points out we probably won't ever want our disembodied robots of the future to be smarter than we are, or at least we won't want them to occupy a status that suggests they're smarter than us. Science fiction authors have grappled with artificial intelligences and robots for decades.
Iain M. Banks's Culture novels describe an intergalactic techno-cratic-Utopia ruled over by computers called Minds - artificial intelligences so vast in intellect that they no longer require any inputs from humans at all.
William Gibson's Neuromancer posits a future in which artificial intelligences are strictly regulated by an international organization to prevent them from becoming too powerful. This scenario strikes me as more likely than a world ruled over by beneficent A.I. such as La from Joe Halderman's The Accidental Time Machine.
Either way, someday the voice recognition software on your smart phone will evolve. Already Siri goes beyond simple commands and simple answers. But whether the Watson of the future will be a Wintermute is impossible to say.
