We're All Doomed: I Would Like to Have Sex With Siri

In We’re All Doomed, amateur futurist (read: paranoid alarmist with access to Wikipedia) Ryan Broderick dissects the news of the week in an effort to prove that the world is probably going to end much too soon.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I could fall in love with a robot. I don’t mean just have sex with a robot, either. For a long time I’ve lived with the knowledge that if some kind of Battlestar Gallactica scenario arose where robots were basically just people with shiny silver stuff inside of them inside of fleshy pink stuff, I could easily have sex with one. And of course, that’s a tough thing to reconcile, the dehumanizing and yet terrifically disgusting and wholly human reality that I could bang something if it looked and seemed human enough. Or hell, even if it looked close enough to a part of a human

But what I mean is that I’ve come to the conclusion that I could fall in love with a robot. Like head over heels, kissing a cold, steel shell and writing love sonnets in binary. (While we’re on the subject of banging things we probably ethically shouldn’t, I’ve also decided that I would probably have sex with a clone of myself too. Of course, if I had the option, I’d have two clones made, one male, one female, and we’d go off and live in the woods together and no one would ever see me again.) But this column isn’t about a genetically engineered polyamorous, masturbatory love commune I’d make if I had the technology to do so, this is about falling in love with artificial intelligence.

Do you know Siri?

She’s the new female roommate that’s moved into my apartment. And just like some kind of adorable ‘90s sitcom, she’s really shaking things up. It’s like Two guys, A Girl, And A Pizza Place, except it’s called Three Guys, A-Server-Based-Artifical-Intelligence-Query-Application-With-A-Female-Voice, And No Pizza Place. She comes with the new iPhone 4s. And contrary to what I assumed, the application is not a tremendous pain in the ass to use. All I’ve ever wanted was a robot that understands what I want, like when I need it to order me a meat lover’s pizza from Papa John’s and stream YouTube videos of The OC and not judge me, damn it.

But this pocket-sized robot secretary is surprisingly great to use. It’s backed up with Wolfram Alpha, Google searches, and a bevy of other cool resources in case it can’t do what you need it to, and there are a lot of fun Easter eggs in it. I asked it what the answer was to life, the universe and everything and it told me 42. It gave the same answer when I asked it how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. So that’s pretty great. Things got kind of dark when I asked Siri if it missed Steve and it replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Even robots have denial I suppose.

Siri’s really important for computing though. Remember laptop computers before the first Macbook? They were hideous and a pain to use. Remember mp3 players before the iPod? They were hideous and a pain to use. Remember cell phones before the iPhone? They were hideous and a pain to use. You see what I mean.

Now, think about the moments after Apple’s beautiful beacons of science-fictiony goodness hit the market. Everyone and their mother wanted one, and every company wanted to offer a knock-off.

Siri is going to do the same thing to our interest in AI assistance. And that explosion of mainstream interest in artificial intelligence is going to almost absolutely start with robot butlers and probably end with me marrying an artificial, cloud-based digital consciousness that I downloaded into a hot lady casing, who knows exactly what I want out of a partner. Which, thinking about it, would most likely be a leggy brunette who smells like barbecue.

Look at that disgusting thing. That’s robotics now. It’s not particularly bright, most contemporary robots can do a few things pretty efficiently, and they usually have a manual transmission-style consciousness. Robots right now think the things we tell them to think. But it can get pretty complex after we tell them to start thinking on their own.

Let’s talk about The Turing Test, possibly the most interesting way to judge progress in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. Alan Turing, in a 1950 paper titled Computing Machinery And Intelligence, wanted to figure out whether or not machines could ever be capable of thinking. I’d imagine my toaster would wonder why I insist on cooking 3 bags of pizza rolls every Saturday night at 3am. (It’s because I’m drunk and lonely, toaster. Now shut up.) Anyways, Turing decided defining the act of thought was way too hard, so he replaced his question of whether or not robots could think with:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ’imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator © who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.

Turing’s version has a computer take the place of either A or B and the interrogator has to figure out which is the computer. It’s not a bad test really. I mean, let’s face it, the act of human thought is really just a lifelong game of absorbing mannerisms, synthesizing the best ones, and spitting them back out. No matter how complex you’d like to feel, at some point in your life you’re going to do something and then moments later realize that it was verbatim something your parents used to do. Then you’ll sigh, defeated, as you realize you’re nothing more than a hairy Xerox. #theresnosuchthingasasoullmao

Will the iPhone 4s’ Siri ever become a fully-realized mechanized consciousness? Almost absolutely not. Watson, the robot that played Jeopardy, probably won’t even get to a level of where its consciousness is human-like. Not even robotic Internet-bully Cleverbot, now 59% human, will probably ever get there.

But it’s not a stretch to say that after a few months of thousands of people using Siri that a huge influx of interest is going to really get the ball rolling on a better class of robot. And of course that leads us to…

Siri does open up a huge market for digital assistants. Companies, like Google, pour money into a Siri competitor that is better and more efficient and simpler to use. Which makes sense, seeing as how Google is what Siri goes to when it can’t figure something out. Use of robot assistants and basic artificial intelligence increases until all low-level corporate and personal assistant jobs are done by robots. This is a pretty great possible future because it eliminates all the jobs newly graduated college students usually take. And let’s face it, people who just graduated college are a pain to be around. One hundred years from now someone will dust off a 3D Bluray re-re-rerelease of the 25th season of Mad Men and wonder what those human women were doing with the phones.

The robotics field explodes once everyone starts using Siri and realizes how gratifying it is to ask an artificial consciousness to order you a meat lover’s pizza from Papa Johns and load up a bunch of YouTube videos of The OC without judging you. Assistants get better and better as robots become more and more human like. A major step is made when they create the iTender, a bartending robot that is complex enough to understand slurred speech. I buy a robot that has a background script that constantly crawls my Google search history and Facebook account to learn how to behave exactly what I want from other people. It also knows to TiVo my favorite shows, which is a plus. And its mechanical smell engine emits the faint, ghostly beautiful aroma of smoked barbecue pork. We fall in love, or rather, I fall in love, and we get married and run away together like two crazy kids. We buy a techno farm, growing our own vegetables and maintaining a rural cell-phone tower.

Until of course, Apple reveals their plan all along, the release of the iPhone 5 turns all Apple-based robots into a sleek, modern-looking robot phalanx with excellent branding, led by a digitally uploaded consciousness of Steve Jobs. And then well, you know the rest.

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