The Apple iPhone 4S, Siri, and the Turing Test

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.

The miracle drug that led me back to the cheeseboard

The perfect cheeseboard (Photo: Alamy)

Daily Telegraph Notebook

Whatever happened to cholesterol? Twenty years ago, everyone was terrified of animal fat. Public health campaigns warned us to avoid artery-clogging cheese and butter.

Now, red meat, rich in saturated fat, is back in fashion, as is offal, which is full of cholesterol. Restaurants that offer meaty delights such as bone marrow and pig’s trotters are booming. And look at Simon Hopkinson’s new cookery show, which has just started on BBC1 in the prime Friday night slot.

“Hoppy”, as he’s known, specialises in lip-smacking, artery-furring dishes that only work if you load them with butter and eggs. “I just love it,” says Hopkinson – “it” being stuff like wobbly quiche lorraine, sticky toffee pudding (“First of all, double cream ”) and, of course, risotto (“clever old rice, butter and cheese”). His salade niçoise isn’t complete without soft-yolked eggs. And the programme is adoringly photographed with lots of slow-motion shots of oil glugging out of bottles.

Where has this new insouciance come from, this relaxed attitude to fat?

Partly, it must be related to the discrediting of the low-fat diet. People noticed that parts of the world where they embraced “low-fat” (but heavily sugared) foods with most enthusiasm – e.g. America – also happened to be where you found the fattest individuals.

The other development is the arrival of cholesterol-blasting statins. Whatever your view of these drugs – some think they’re over-prescribed – they are taken by five million patients in Britain, of whom I am one. I have experienced the joy of seeing the levels of “bad” fats in my blood plummet – as if by magic.

My GP put me on a low dose, to treat raised cholesterol. Six months later, I went for a review; the doctor looked at his screen, showing that my lipids were miraculously reduced, and said: “Wow.” You can understand why GPs might be evangelical about this medicine, since it does its job so amazingly well – more than can be said for a lot of drugs.

Now, people know there is a solution. You still have to eat sensibly. But before statins, those unfortunates who built up high levels of fat in their blood, like me, had little choice in middle age: give up cheese, or face a multiple heart bypass. There are inconveniences with statins. You can’t eat grapefruit, because it interferes with the medicine’s absorption. But, as I hover over the cheeseboard, I can’t pretend I’m concerned about the absence of grapefruit in my diet.

…

To mark 50 years since the death of Ernest Hemingway, the publisher André Deutsch has brought out a coffee-table book of photographs of the author. Papa with a marlin, Papa hunting big game, Papa at a bullfight. One image shows him sitting at a typewriter, but he was also happy writing while standing up. Kenneth Lynn’s biography has a photo of Hemingway standing by a desk that comes up to elbow height. Lynn says the novelist “wrote compulsively, often standing up”. Another writer who worked standing up was John Henry Newman. That is where the similarities end. Try as I might, I can’t see Cardinal Newman propping his foot on the carcass of a wildebeest that he’s just bagged.

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I’m not sure what to think about the children’s internet craze Moshi Monsters. These creepy virtual pets come in lurid colours, with fur and huge eyes that denote empathy, I think. There’s a commercial angle, obviously: it starts off free, but parents have to shell out a fiver a month if their children want access to the Underground Disco, where they find Lady GooGoo and Broccoli Spears. Our oldest child says to me: “I’m adopting you a monster.” But he only wants to get me involved so I agree to pay for a subscription. I don’t think I will adopt a Moshi. Grown-ups are not supposed to understand their children’s mental worlds.