…but you can imagine an MA-gone-bad doing something like this:
If a report from The Sun is to be believed, a demo unit for the iPhone 4S caught fire for telling 12-year-old Charlie Le Quesne to “Shut the f— up, you ugly t—.”
Charlie reportedly asked Siri “How many people are there in the world?” and that was the answer he got back. Together with his mother and the manager, they asked the demo iPhone 4S the same question and got the same answer back yet again. Needless to say, the demo unit was unplugged and sent back to Apple for “diagnostic tests.”
The errors seems to have stemmed from Siri thinking that the questioner’s name was “Shut the f— up, you ugly t—.”
Which tells me that another, mischievous customer had been messing around with the unit prior to this incident.
Which just proves that, however slick and smart the Siri interface might seem, it’s still a long way from being a “simulacrum intelligence”-based mobile agent.