But if Apple has cracked something here, this could be the first time we ever get to see the real Siri — the Siri we were promised all those years ago. Maybe in the next commercial, Deschanel’s tomato soup will just magically appear at her house, and the Headspace app will fire up to bring Malkovich some inner peace. Maybe, finally, we’re going to get the Siri Apple always wanted to make.
Instead, perhaps the right way -- and the best way -- to introduce AI into people's lives has always been to meet them where they already are, from the apps they use every day to the gestures they're familiar with, like prompting Siri. Apple's new AI features don't need to be flashy or futuristic; they just need to be boringly awesome.
This of course is proposing a paradox, that I’ve talked about before: here we have a general-purpose technology, and yet the way to deploy is to unbundle it into single-purpose tools and experiences. But this might just be misplacing the right level of abstraction. Electric motors are a general-purpose technology, but you don’t buy a box of electric motors from Home Depot - you buy a drill, a washing machine and a blender. The technology is instantiated into use cases. PCs and smartphones are general-purpose tools that replaced single-purpose tools - typewriters, calculators, voice recorders and music players - but each of those functions is achieved through a piece of single-purpose software: most people don’t use Excel as a word processor. One reason that some people are so excited about LLMs is the they might not follow that pattern: they might move up through all of those levels of abstraction to the top. That would leave no room for ‘thin GPT wrappers’. Yet I don’t think they can really do that yet, and so everything I’ve just written is really just wondering what you can build to change the world even if that never happens.
At last month’s iPad Pro M4 launch, Tim Cook said it was “the biggest day for iPad since its introduction.” That was pretty clearly not the case: it was a day of really nice incremental hardware updates to a tablet that already had more power than most people know what to do with.
But Cook’s proclamation could still be true, at least in retrospect. Apple just needs to stick the landing and use WWDC to show us a powerful operating system that’s worthy of the new iPad Pro’s powerful hardware.
On one hand, the message appears to be that no one will escape the reach of Brussels. On the other, the European Commission, led by President Ursula von der Leyen, has to demonstrate that the many digital laws and regulations that are in place actually produce positive results.
“A much greater issue is likely to be the content viewed,” says Peirson. “Reading work emails relating to impending deadlines is clearly going to cause anxiety, and anxiety is strongly related to insomnia.”
We also know that doomscrolling on social media can have negative effects, including less and poorer quality sleep. Getting too engrossed in anything on your phone makes it all too easy to stay up later than you should.
RSS feels like social media used to be. I choose which blogs I read and there’s no algorithm in between deciding what I should be shown and what not.
How many of these new AI features will be made available on my little iPhone 12 mini? And how many of these will I care?
(No, I don't think I will be using AI emojis. I don't even use the regular emojis that often. My go-tos are emoticons.)
:-)
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Thanks for reading.