Apple’s CEO made a stunning statement during today’s fourth quarter earning’s call: Apple gets more than 2 billion Siri requests per week! Now, to put this fact in a present-day perspective, I dusted off some of my writings on the topic. And as you read through them, keep this 2-billion-requests fact in mind. This is big data on steroids. It is the sort of mass behavior that will drive the rise of massive ontological frameworks that will, in turn, drive very interesting and useful computational law applications in the near future.

May 1, 2010 – Apple Acquires Siri

• The Cognitive Assistant that Learns Organizes (CALO) is a DARPA-funded project.  CALO seeks to develop “cognitive” software systems, which it describes as those that can “reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”

• Apple’s acquisition is a commercialization of an AI application, and an investment (to the tune of $200M) in the future of the mobile web.

October 31, 2011 – Siri: What’s Next?

• Google’s Andy Rubin: “You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side.”  I don’t know about you, but to me that statement smells a bit like “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” (Digital Equipment Corp.’s founder and CEO Ken Olson).
• From an AI perspective the introduction of Siri is a watershed development, finally bringing this technology to a phenomenally popular consumer device.  And this is about to get even bigger and soon.  This is because even though at this point we’re only seeing her in the iPhone 4s, rumors are that she will be soon arriving in the iPad and the much-hyped Apple TV (not the little black box version, but a full-blown Apple-branded TV).   We also need to keep in mind that this is all very new and she is really somewhere between an alpha and beta-level product.  Once she moves into the world of versions with decimal point numbers we will probably look back and chuckle at the early awkwardness.
• From a computational law perspective, Siri brings intriguing possibilities helping make legal decisions more accessible to everyone.  Consider for example, you are going to lease a used car through an on-line broker such as Carsoup.com.  Imagine also that Carsoup has an iPhone app and that it is designed so you can conduct the entire lease transaction through it.  You go and navigate through the application process and throughout you can ask Siri any variety of legal questions about various legal aspects of the application.  You want to know, for instance, whether the warranty on the used car you’re interested in is reasonable.  Siri could provide an answer such as “In comparing the warranty terms of 13 other car dealers in a 200-mile radius from your current location for the same car, this warranty is similar to all of them.  You’re not going to find a better deal in this region.  It’s ok.” (Note: I’m purposefully not addressing at this point whether Siri’s answer would be illegal if properly viewed as unauthorized practice of law.)

October 26, 2016

• Siri is on Apple TV, the iPad, Mac and the Apple Watch.
• Siri is on demand with “hey Siri.”

Future

• Siri interfaces with Lex Machina
• Siri interfaces with Watson

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Updates:

6/23/2017: Apple is reportedly working on a dedicated AI chip, the “Apple Neural Engine” (ANE). Shifting current AI-tasks from the main processor and the graphics chip to the ANE aims at dramatically boosting device AI capabilities. What exactly this will mean for computational law applications is too early to tell, but it is safe to say that it will expand them. ANE on mobile devices, for example, will likely amplify AI-app capabilities, taking the Carsoup.com example discussed here to new levels, in addition to transforming the mobile device’s learning capabilities. It will also be interesting to see how peripheral devices, such as IoT, interact with ANE-powered devices. The extent to which “smart” interactivity protocols will be developed will directly impact how robust these applications can become.

3/4/2017: The Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of People (IoP) can be viewed as massive data-creation/aggregation platforms. Exabyte-level data creation becomes the new normal and stands to stretch current data ownership questions, needs and standards to new dimensions. In the IoT and IoP ecosystem, maintaining data integrity will be the single most important attribute and the one that garners the highest design priority. How will this be most efficiently accomplished in IoT and IoP? Through the blockchain. It will become the single most powerful data ownership protection standard in this ecosystem. And here’s a prediction: A not too-distant-future version of NIST SP800-53, or differently numbered publication, (and other standards, e.g., COBIT) will reference blockchain protocols as a must-have for IoT (and a bit later) for IoP.