The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

Today, people want no knowledge but lots of data and machine learning.”

It’s a tricky but substant...

Today, researchers are less interested in developing AI’s ability to reason and more intent on having them do more and more complex machine learning, which is not unlike automated data mining.

The difference between this data-driven approach and the logic-driven approach is that this computer doesn’t know anything about Van Gogh or what an artist is.

It is only imitating patterns—often very well—that it has seen before.

“The computer vision, computer speech, understanding, pattern recognition, and these things did not do well with knowledge representations. They did better w...

The machine learning has just gotten really good at making generalizations o...

But there is, of course, a deficiency in ...

“The machine-learned models, no one really has any idea of what the models ...

they just perform in a way that meets the objective function of ...

Scientists have a fairly good grasp on how human perception works—the mechanisms that allow us to hear and see—and th...

They don’t, of course, have that kind of understanding of how our brains work. There’s no scientific consensus on how humans...

The databases can mimic how we hear and see, but ...

In 2003, decades later, DARPA made an unexpected return to the AI game. The agency gave the nonprofit research outfit SRI International around two hundred million dollars to organize five hundred top scientists in a concerted research effort to build a virtual AI.

One reason for the DoD’s sudden interest in AI could have been the escalation of the Iraq War,

Regardless, AI went from semi-dormant to a field of major activity.

CALO was, “by any measure, the largest AI program in history,”

How would you represent all the bits an assistant needs to know?

Like, how do you recognize speech? How do you recognize human language? How do you understand service providers like Yelp or your calendar app and how do you combine the input with task intent?”

the same paradigm everyone uses is these conversational threads,

there’s content in between.”

It’s not just command and response, designed to be as efficient as possible. Siri talks to you. “Ther...

“The Siri play was mobile from the beginning,” he says. “Let’s do an assistant, let’s make it mobile. And then let’s add speech, when speech is ready.…

“We had to teach people what you could and couldn’t say to it, which is still a problem,

Siri would often be sluggish because it would take time to process commands and formulate a response.

you fall back on either web search or on a thing that looks like Siri knows something when it doesn’t.”

Siri is, basically, buying time.

that illusion becomes less necessary the more adapted to your voice Siri becomes.

They also had to think about how best to foster engagement, to get people interested in returning to Siri.

very quickly, we saw what were going to be the top questions and then we wrote really good answers.

Today, an entire team writes Siri’s dialogue. And they spend a lot of time fine-tuning its tone.

At first, Siri was notorious for misinterpreting commands, and the novelty of a voice-activated AI perhaps overpowered its utility.

In 2014, Apple plugged Siri into a neural net, allowing it to harness machine learning techniques and deep neural networks, while retaining many of its previous techniques, and it slowly improved its performance.

So just how smart can Siri get? “There’s no excuse for it not having super-powers,”

Gruber says Siri can’t offer emotional intelligence—yet. He says they need to find a theory to program first.

we now know a lot about what people want in life and what they want to say to a computer and what they say to an assistant.

you can’t say, ‘Hey, Siri, don’t forget my room is 404’ and ‘Remind me when I’m hungry to eat or when I’m thirsty to drink water.’

It can’t do those things. It doesn’t know the world, it doesn’t see the world like we do.

But if it’s hooked up to sensors that do, then there’s no re...

So Siri is kind of a GUI-buster,

it’s about intelligence at the interface. So to me that’s the big problem. Our intel, our interfaces are hard to use and needlessly so.”

you just want to be careful not to connect to any Wi-Fi.”

As more people start regarding smartphones as their primary internet devices and conducting more of their sensitive affairs on them, smartphones are increasingly going to become targets of hackers, identity thieves, and incensed ex-lovers.

For hackers, there are two main ways to break through a password.

The first is via social engineering—watching

The second is “brute-forcing” it—methodically guessing every single code combination until you hit the right one. Hackers—and security agencies—use sophisticated software to ...

the iPhone is designed to resist brute-force attempts, and newer models eventually delete the encryption key altogether, rendering the data inaccessible.

The company says it designs iPhone hardware and software to prioritize user security and privacy, and many cybersecurity experts agree that it’s one of the most secure devices on the market.

One reason for this is that Apple doesn’t know your personal passcode—it’s stored on the phone itself, in an area called the Secure Enclave, and paired with an ID number specific to your iPhone.

This maximizes consumer security but is also a proactive maneuver aga...