http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/siris-return-reputation-under-suspicion-of-being-fawlty Just another bbPress community en-US Sun, 19 May 2013 10:24:18 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/search.php http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/siris-return-reputation-under-suspicion-of-being-fawlty#post-279621 Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:28:10 +0000 Nitro 279621@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ <p><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/why-the-problem-with-siri-matters/853" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/why-the-problem-with-siri-matters/853</a></p> <p>Was someone on the Siri, ( the &quot;assistant app&quot; in the Apple store that is fairly popular ), development team a religious, pro-life fanatic who snuck some not-so-liberal design principles into the applications &quot;nature&quot;? </p> <p>The suspicion is not so crazy-paranoid, especially if you&#39;ve ever written a software program in your life ( read: php, perl, VB, jax, html....erm, yeah...these don&#39;t &#39;count&#39; in terms of real software engineering, sorry but there&#39;s big kids and adults and the two don&#39;t jibe &#39;under the hood&#39; ). Point is, a software engineer, particularly a savvy, experienced one, could very easily design a program with a whollllllll lotta &#39;default&#39; behaviors that would strike most people as behaviors that should not be &#39;default&#39;.</p> <p>Like, plotting against someone you don&#39;t know and never will, behind their back, simply because you don&#39;t like what they write should not be a default behavior and isn&#39;t, as far as I know, considered either socially acceptable nor particularly intelligent.</p> <p>We know that pro-lifers have done some really crazy stuff. For example, starting The Army of God. A few members, I believe, were guilty of murdering doctors who worked in clinics that offered women abortions should they so choose.</p> <p>The article to the link above indicates Siri has some problems with women finding rape counseling centers and abortion clinics. Hmmm....on first glance most would think,&quot;Meh, just some trivial glitch.&quot; I wouldn&#39;t even be surprised if some of Siri&#39;s female users first blamed themselves for Siri returning &#39;pro-life counseling&#39; centers. But Siri has been put to the query test over and over lately and isn&#39;t really coming out smelling so particularly &#39;enlightened&#39; when it comes to womens issue....sorry, but the question,&quot;Who and how many were responsible for designing Siri?&quot; is certainly credible and the answer to that question is important. </p> <p>I think many of you can imagine lots of ramifications of malfunctioning software as those that are &#39;life critical&#39;. That&#39;s a no-brainer.</p> <p>But what about search engines who are designed not just to get you results, but to get results *in your best interests* as determined by people you don&#39;t know? What do you think of that? </p>