The Committee to Nuke Elysium

An entity like Siri, for instance, is not aspiring to become more human; Siri would want to be many times more efficient than that. Siri does not have one conversation like the conversation we are having here. Siri has hundreds of thousands of conversations at once. It wants to look through more databases faster; it does not want to read its way through a book, quietly pondering, like Alan Turing might have done.

You do not want Siri to be more like Alan Turing, you want Siri to be more like Apple Inc. You want Siri to do everything that Apple can do: Geophysically locate things, run big databases, find apps for you, look for movie locations. Alan Turing does not know every movie in California! You are getting in the way when you say, “Siri, why can’t you be more like a Mid-20th century gay mathematician? So you can pass the Turing Test.” That would be metaphysically pleasing; it would have made Turing’s point. Me in one room, Siri in the other room, and we seem exactly the same; therefore, cognition equals computation. Cognition does not equal computation. You do not even want cognition to equal computation. You are getting in the way of making computation do things that are of genuine interest.