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While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text. What the

While I agree with you in principle, I feel like the conceptual use cases you're imagining implement current practices with basically a speech to text. What the author is suggesting is that it would be beyond this, skipping out the step where you determine how you do something, but instead telling Siri what you want to do. For example, with excel I'm not sure he envisaged something like "A5 is 20, A6 is 30" and so on, but more like, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet". That said, irrespective of any kind of AI revolution Siri may (or as I suspect) may not induce, I feel like predicting it's impact before we've even had the chance to test it out in any kind of capacity (OK the 4S has been on sale for two hours, but you know what I mean) is somewhat short sighted.

baggachipz 15y ago
Ahh, but the devil is in the details. In the given example, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet", it sounds really nice. However, consider this: Anything that you can't tell a person to do, you won't be able to tell this system to do. If you task a person with "taking your taxes and putting them into a spreadsheet", they're going to ask, "how?" "What's the purpose?" "What do you want the spreadsheet to look like?" "Do you want everything from your taxes on one sheet?" The list goes on and on. So, while the idea seems really nice, the idea that this or any A.I. implementation will be the kind of insane revolution the OP is predicting is laughable.
Tichy 15y ago
Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))} That's nice, but it is not AI.
- alexholehouse 15y ago
  Sure, and I'm not for one second Siri could do that, but a) I was under the impression Siri was doing some kind of semantic analysis rather than straight text recognition? b) I just meant if we suspended disbelief and Siri was this magical AI tool it would do something like that, my second point is just that because we don't know what Siri can/will do it seems ridiculous to say it's going to change the world. I totally agree with you, I'm just saying there are almost two separate discussions here, one being Siri and it's implementation, the other being the impact of AI on our lives. If Siri was the new AI, then these would be the same discussion, but as I don't think it is, it's not.

baggachipz 15y ago

Ahh, but the devil is in the details. In the given example, "Take my taxes from this pdf and put them into a spreadsheet", it sounds really nice. However, consider this: Anything that you can't tell a person to do, you won't be able to tell this system to do. If you task a person with "taking your taxes and putting them into a spreadsheet", they're going to ask, "how?" "What's the purpose?" "What do you want the spreadsheet to look like?" "Do you want everything from your taxes on one sheet?" The list goes on and on. So, while the idea seems really nice, the idea that this or any A.I. implementation will be the kind of insane revolution the OP is predicting is laughable.

Tichy 15y ago

Except Siri doesn't do anything of the kind. It would be trivial to build "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet" into Siri (or indeed any speech recognition engine). But that would only be one more special case. The code is literally "if (recognizedText == "take my taxes from this PDF and put them into a spreadsheet"){writeExcelSheet(parsePDFTable("taxes.pdf"))} That's nice, but it is not AI.

alexholehouse 15y ago
Sure, and I'm not for one second Siri could do that, but a) I was under the impression Siri was doing some kind of semantic analysis rather than straight text recognition? b) I just meant if we suspended disbelief and Siri was this magical AI tool it would do something like that, my second point is just that because we don't know what Siri can/will do it seems ridiculous to say it's going to change the world. I totally agree with you, I'm just saying there are almost two separate discussions here, one being Siri and it's implementation, the other being the impact of AI on our lives. If Siri was the new AI, then these would be the same discussion, but as I don't think it is, it's not.