- I tried the same question on every other system I know where it should work: “What time is it in London?”
DuckDuckGo: got it right.
Google: got it right.
Alexa: got it right.
Bing: got it right.
The mistake Gruber is making here is that DDG, Google, Alexa, and Bing did not "get it right". Their answer wasn't wrong, but it's not because they "got it". They never "got it" any more than Siri didn't.
AI is a story we tell ourselves.
I don’t understand your objection, is it a Chinese room argument? The author doesn’t claim that search engines understand what cities or time are, just that the algorithms successfully give the information requested, as a reliable human assistant would. The carbon vs. silicon debate might consider how useful a carbon-based mechanism would be if it had no access to silicon-based tools and data. For now the two substrates are interdependent.
AI is a way for multinational tech corps to silo you away from the Internet. "I could search for it but then I might see information that hasn't been carefully cultivated to maximize the profit centers of the device in my hand so instead I'll ask it so they can run my simple query through proprietary bullshit." My Samsung has four buttons. One of them does nothing but wake up "bixby", the R/C Cola of digital assistants. It is due to this button that it is far easier to accidentally take a screengrab of nonsense than deliberately take a picture of something and it is so vital to Samsung's future that the button cannot be repurposed to something else.
For your sanity here's an app to fix the button. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jamworks.bxactions
Agents are a cool idea. The main problem with them is that the infrastructure to make them work never got adopted (except, perversely, by Facebook for targeting advertisements), so you need a bunch of fragile hand written scripts to interact with every service the agent might want to interact with. Alexia/Siri/Bixby/whatever have the additional problem that they're not your agent, they're Amazon/Apple/Samsung's sales agent.
