This is a fantastic point, and I think a lot of AI development that goes in the direction of trying to replace human beings is essentially absurd. We already ha

This is a fantastic point, and I think a lot of AI development that goes in the direction of trying to replace human beings is essentially absurd. We already have humans, why would we want something that can do what humans can already do? Rather, we want something that extends the capabilities of humans into areas where they aren't proficient. For instance, why do we put all this effort into natural language processing when humans are already totally optimized for it? What we need is a solution to scaling, not a solution to NLP itself. EDIT: To expand; one way to do something like Siri would be to have a system that routed requests to human operators. The human operator would give the correct answer to the request, and then the system would use that as training data. If the system was reasonably confident it already knew the answer to the request from previous training data, it would answer right away, but if it was below a certain confidence it would route to a human. This seems like the smartest way to leverage machine learning in these kinds of scenarios, and I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already tried it or something similar in the past.