Surprising Discovery on Siri by Apple

Hey, I think Apple was just incompetent when they designed the software, and it's just Hanlon's Razor in action here...

^^Glad we are in clear.

^I don't suppose you got a chance to do that search USA...

Some people would say A.I. Is a Crapshoot! Think Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!.

The problem is that artificial intelligence may be too intelligent and think on its own. It may embarras Apple by doing things that are obviously correct vie it artifical super intelligence, but humans tend to differ due to limited intellect.

edited 2nd Dec '11 10:32:37 AM by secretist

I'll link the article when I get home, but the American Prospect basically summarized my opinion on the matter: software designed by men with, most likely, both a lack of ability to take on other points of view and a lack of omniscience.

In other words, incompetence, not maliciousness.

What's the gender ration among Apple engineers anyways?

Well software design is a male dominated field. But we can't really guess how a female run apple world be difference other then we wouldn't of loss steve jobs to prostate cancer.

That fact really has nothing to do with the issue of AI glitches. It could be politicizing the issue. Pro-choice women want pro-life men to shut up and pro-life women to shut up, but not as much.

Here is the article.

The article assumes all women are pro-choice sort of. Pro-life women would probably be praising Apple/Siri if people asked them. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

edited 2nd Dec '11 1:39:20 PM by secretist

Well, the American Prospect is a liberal magazine, so I'm not surprised.

However, setting aside my personal bias against abortion, it is in fact legal by the... current interpretation of the... Constitution, and therefore it would be wrong to preclude a search service from finding results for things like abortion clinics or birth control.

That said, the article even mentions, Siri is not AI, it's just a fancy voice search service, so if they didn't think to make the query "abortion clinic" reroute to, say, "Planned Parenthood," in the US, then it makes sense that it wouldn't come up with much of anything. That, plus localization software, points to it being less malice and more "wow, we just didn't think of that."

Which brings up things like unintentional sexism, but I think that might be a bit too harsh on the Apple team. They're human, and I don't expect them to think of every little thing. It's still not very good, and there is an aspect of unintentional sexism, but I don't think it's as severe as we might think, given how complex software design of this nature very likely is.

As I said, Hanlon's Razor, in a nutshell.

Or it could be the fact anti-abortion legislatures had shut down alot of abortion clinics in a given state through tough regulation, thus making no abortion clinics in the immediate area.

Well, the vast majority of the United States isn't even covered by abortion clinics due to them being privately funded, largely-speaking. Most other countries... that have government healthcare, at least... fund abortion clinics. Thus, even if they weren't shutting them down, most States wouldn't have a clinic in them—or not nearly enough given their population size/spread—to actually cover everyone in the State to begin with...

Yes, an not to mention the threat of anti-abortion violence decreases the likelihood of an abortion clinic near you.

I do not think the absence of abortion clinics in NYC or LA was the problem. The problem was the aforementioned lack of abortion clinics named "Abortionapalooza" or the like. The keyword "abortion" just doesn't get you anything because abortion clinics don't use that word in their names, usually.

And yet, when I do a Google search for an abortion clinic, it gives me the nearest clinics and their ratings.

I don't know. Hypothetically If Apple's official policy was not to provide information for certain legal but controversial services on moral grounds *

But as this thread has already shown, that isn't the case. What with the providing contacts for escorts and so on.

USAF's article pretty much sums up my opinion: It's was a program created mostly by men who really didn't consider what specifically female needs should also have been worked into the system.

Because Google works differently, on a keyword system involving a trawl of the facility's entire website, rather than on a very few keywords, mostly comprised of the facility's name?

I really don't see what there is to talk anymore, the code is buggy. That's all there is,

Alas you're right, the only other reason I can see is Apple trying to stop abortions to increases it's potential customer base.

edited 3rd Dec '11 11:43:53 AM by joeyjojo

But the people who are pro-life are scared of a talking computer.

Weird. Why would birth control be automatically associated with "clinics" of any kind? Unless one buys into the fallacious "abortion pill" characterization provided by the subset of pro-lifers that equate buying birth control with going into a clinic and having a third trimester abortion, it doesn't make much sense to me.

For birth control, wouldn't you just ask for a pharmacy?

Why wouldn't it direct you to a pharmacy, then? Not all types of birth control are available over the counter, or at a pharmacy.

Well, according to the article I read, Siri isn't actually a search engine, it's a collector of data from other search engines.

That just sounds like a recipe for poor result processing. Unfortunately for Apple, it looks like that, plus structural, unintended sexism have converged to make them look really bad.