I was totally wrong about Scott Walker (what a flameout — politics is really not my thing), but something I was and will be right about is Siri and what it augurs.

On my older blog when Siri was first introduced, I opined that tech historians looking back would find it the most important feature and harbinger of the future introduced during the smartphone era.

People are realizing that this is true already.

As David Pierce wrote recently in Wired, voice recognition and artificial intelligence are getting so good so quickly that it isn’t really a stretch to imagine that talking to computers will soon become one of the signature ways we interact with them.

AI, robotics, facial recognition and voice control (all related problems, btw) are improving so ridiculously quickly that people just have no clue.

It won’t be all that long before we look back at most of Ex Machina as being dated rather than futuristic. And like Kevin Drum it’s not that I think AI is some spectacular amazing achievement, it’s more that humans just aren’t really all that smart (our machines are just even dumber but rapidly improving).