How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F

> The second reason that such systems are extremely unlikely to emerge is that even if it would be doable technically, it would be extremely expensive to a company. And there would be literally no demand for it, because the overwhelming majority of people don't care about talking to robots. They already don't have enough time to spend with their children, partners, friends, parents... why would anyone waste time with a fake person? No company would invest the billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, to solve this problem in the next few hundred years.

You've missed the point. Why would people watch a TV show and grow to love/hate characters, where there's no interaction between you and them, and all the lines, actions and scenes are scripted and rehearsed. They certainly don't have time to do it, and have children, partners, friends, parents. They would surely not binge watch, schedule time to watch new episodes come rain hail or shine or spend big bucks to visit filming locations etc.

Companies will invest stupid amounts of money in AI that has human qualities. Take the TV Show example: the AI is the "show" and each day they get into entertaining or emotional circumstances that you can "catch up" about, joke about etc. Their charisma is highly engineered to be incredibly engaging and fun to talk to, so you keep coming back for more. Over time they become a "good friend" that you love talking to. They never rebuff you, snub you, have no time for you, make fun of you (too much, just enough to joke around and have some banter). But why do they keep telling you how great Pepsi's new flavours are??

One really interesting idea related to the passing of the Turing test and formation of relationships between humans and AIs:

Our relationships with other humans have become increasingly digital, progressing from face to face communication to letters to the telephone to text / facebook / other social messages. Each step in this progression lowers the bar drastically for AI to start fulfilling peoples' social needs. We can now maintain or even establish a relationship with another human solely using text-based messaging, and I believe that soon we will reach the point where AIs can get 90% of the way there. I don't know when it will happen but I wouldn't bet against it.

This has been true since forever. In the 1960s, the chatbot ELIZA got people to talk to it for hours. To the point it's creator was deeply disturbed and began to advocate against AI.

As time goes on, the AI effect kicks in. People get used to AIs and it takes more and more to impress or fooled by them. Once we get real human level AI, I expect people will treat them like they do in bad sci fi movies (for the probably short period of time they are our equals.) Just like people treat slaves and lower classes in other societies, not something you would form a relationship with.

But really we are nowhere near that point. Chatbots have gotten really advanced, but they are still basically chatbots.

Is bandwidth not a concern? 65 GB could take weeks to download.

Your comment doesn't seem to relate to the article.

> where an AI like Siri can beat the turing test for any living human.

A key aspect of Siri in this article is that the responses make sense. There is no trickery or deception. When she says "Marriage is not included in my end-user agreement," there is no way someone could mistake her a human, and that's a good thing. Here, the more relevant philosophical questions are ones like "How much can machines or machine intelligences be a part of our lives and our society as machines?" and "Are there more beneficial and interesting goals for our machine intelligences than the Turing test (given that their value may be predicated on the fact that they are not humans)?"