Siri is Dumb. There, We Said It.
Apple's remarkable iPhone 4S personal assistant doesn't seem to like helping women find abortion services. But Siri isn't anti-choice, it's just a hammer dressed up as a person.
The flap over Siri's to point users to abortion services makes for great political theater. It's also an indictment of our understanding of how technology works.
Apple's response to the controversy has been to say that, no, its voice-recognizing personal assistant doesn't have an anti-abortion agenda. It's just in beta. Journalists—myself included, unfortunately—have taken that to mean that Siri has a "glitch."
Siri doesn't have a glitch. It's just dumb. And that's not a terrible thing.
A glitch refers to some piece of technology's failure to do something it's intended to do. But Siri is doing exactly what it was built to do—provide answers to questions like, "Where can I get an abortion?" using its own algorithms and the online resources it has available to craft answers. Siri would have an actual glitch if it couldn't understand diphthongs or something.
The problem, however, is that as technological tools have increasingly become an indispensible part of our lives, we sometimes forget that they are just that—tools. Nobody is shocked to discover that a hammer isn't very good at sawing wood, yet when it comes to the more complex technology in our smartphones and PCs, we often get angry when it can't do stuff it was never built to do.
Then we yell at the offending device as if it was an incompetent or outright malicious person who's out to make our lives miserable.
That's nothing new. Humans have been practicing anthropomorphism since the dawn of time. And you better believe that this proclivity really kicks into overdrive with a technology like Siri, which, unlike that hammer, is actually designed to fool us into thinking it's intelligent.
It's not. Siri is only as smart as its programming, its inputs, and the resources it can access to provide answers. It's not pro-life or pro-choice or much of an instrument of human agency at all, beyond the various manipulations of search engine optimization experts.
Apple is treading carefully in response to this issue, because like many consumer technology companies, it is selling tools masked as a "lifestyle," an "experience," and that sort of thing. The last thing Apple wants to get across is that Siri is just a high-falutin' hammer.
A very elegant hammer, to be sure, but a hammer nonetheless. Until the singularity happens, that's what all of our technology is.
Now Apple could fiddle with Siri so that the app does point you to Planned Parenthood if you ask about getting an abortion, rather than to pro-life organizations that counsel women not have abortions. The problem with this approach is that the strength of a technology like Siri lies in the ability of its core programming to handle various different, complex, and unforeseen tasks asked of it with consistent results—even "learning" over time to provide more accurate and appropriate answers as its database fills up with positive human reactions to its correct responses.
(The go-to reference for this sort of thing is which readers are free to investigate on their own.)
So instead of promising a custom fix, Apple is rightly pointing out that Siri is a new technology that's going to get better in the months and years ahead, which it assuredly will. Ray Kurzweil aside, though, it's difficult to foresee a day when Siri gets so smart that it can parse through the myriad facets of human expression at the level that actual humans can.
Consider the current kerfuffle. This is simplifying things a bit, but the gist of this story is that Siri is getting hung up on a word, "abortion," because organizations that actually offer abortion services tend not to use the word as much as anti-abortion organizations do. So when Siri goes looking for where to get an "abortion" in the digital wordscape of the Internet, lo and behold, it returns addresses for Crisis Pregnancy Centers rather than Planned Parenthood.
And that's just one word out of tens of thousands that may have very different contextual meanings in meatspace as opposed to cyberspace, multiplied by the tens of thousands of languages used by humans around the world (guess what—if you ask Siri where to find a "taxi dance," you shouldn't be shocked when it provides you with the number for Yellow Cab). Add in all the other layers of communication we humans process instantaneously and with phenomenal accuracy—tone, inflection, humor, gestures, facial expressions, emotional weight, etiquette, etc.—and it becomes clear that for all its wonderful abilities, Siri still has far more in common with the hammer than with us.