‘Siri, You’re Stupid’: Limitations of artificial intelligence baffle kids who expect more by Lauren Barack.
A deeply amusing post that begins:
My eight-year-old daughter, Harper, got her hands on a new iPhone 4S, and that’s when trouble started. Within minutes, she grew impatient with Siri after posing some queries to Apple’s speech-recognition “assistant” feature: “Can you pronounce my Mother’s name?” “Where do I live?” and “Is there dust on the moon?”—questions she did not assume the artificial voice wouldn’t answer. As it failed, delivering replies such as “Sorry, I don’t know where that is,” Harper became increasingly irritated, until she loudly concluded, “Siri, you’re stupid!” It responded “I’m doing my best.”
I think there is a lesson here to not create expectations among our users that are unrealistic. True, I think semantic technologies can be useful but they are not magical nor can they convert management/personnel issues into technical ones, much less solve them.
If two departments are not reliably sharing information now, the first question to investigate is why? It may well be simply a terminology issue, in which case a topic map could help them overcome that barrier and more effectively share information.
If the problem is that they are constantly undermining each others work and would rather the business fail than share information with the other department that might make it stand out, then topic maps are unlikely to be of assistance.