You may, if you have walked past a newsstand, caught more than five seconds of any news programme or accessed pretty much any part of the internet in the last 24 hours, have been made aware of the existence of a thing called the iPhone 4S. If you have read beyond the headline of any of those stories, you may be aware that it comes with a feature called Siri.
If you have actually watched what Siri is supposed to do, you may have stocked up on canned goods and bottled water, and installed a ferroconcrete bunker down the bottom of the garden ahead of the coming war with the machines.
I exaggerate. Slightly. Siri is a piece of voice recognition software, part-developed by the US military research group Darpa, which allows you to talk to your phone. Its advert shows a bunch of clear-skinned, clean-limbed Americans chatting away with the thing as though it's a childhood friend. "Is it chilly in San Francisco this weekend?" "Not too cold," it replies. "Maybe down to 61 degrees." "How about Napa Valley?" "Doesn't seem like it". The ad shows the whole process with a background of jaunty ragtime music, but I really would rather have it played out to something dark and industrial, preferably the duh-duh duh duh-duh theme to Terminator 2.
There are two ways that this can go. Either it's an outrageously misleading advert, and the voice-recognition thing will be the usual pointless and infuriating chore it always was – switching on at arbitrary moments and calling your mother in the middle of a meeting – or it really does what it says. Shane Richmond, our technology editor, has had a brief play around with it and he gets the sense that it "could be a big deal".
Being able to talk to a computer in natural language – "What's the traffic like around here?" "Text my wife and tell her I'll be 30 minutes late" – is pure sci-fi. It's even got the same lilting-feminine-robot voice of every space-opera computer in history.
I'm sure you've all heard of the Turing Test, invented by the great British code-breaker, mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing: an early, pragmatic suggestion for determining whether or not computers have intelligence. In it, a human judge would attempt to determine, from a conversation (usually text-based), whether they are talking to a human or a computer. If they cannot reliably judge, then the machine, to all intents and purposes, can be considered to be intelligent.
I'm not, by any means, suggesting that the iPhone 4S is actually anywhere near that. But it is, on the evidence of the advert, the closest of anything I've ever seen; it's the first real-life computer to give me the Uncanny Valley effect just by talking. You can't help but wonder, while watching it, how long it will be before it says, with chilling calm, "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that". We're living in the future, and I have to admit I'm a little bit scared of it.
All that said, I'll probably still buy one. I'm a geek, you see.
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