The tech behind Siri, Apple's voice command thing, which I'm sure you've all heard about already, just keeps getting more interesting. At the same time though, Siri gets a little scarier.
When I see anything on Twitter that suggests better artificial intelligence, better ways of killing and better ways at combining them—I like to retweet it and hashtag it with
#SkyNET. That way, I can say "I told you so" when we're all bowing down to our Chinese-manufacture T1000s, managed by an all-seeing HAL9000 clone.
Well, here's another one of those bits… Mac-know-it-alls,
iFixit have discovered that the iPhone 4S has an always-on IR beam that detects when you're holding the phone at your face, thus invoking Siri. This can be enabled in Settings/General/Siri by turning on 'Raise to Speak'.
This has two, obvious impacts on the way we use the iPhone 4s: the first is that it's a clear battery drain. It's not news that disabling 'Raise to Speak' is a good way to increase the 4S' dismal battery life. But it sheds more light on how it's draining the battery.
But this is the beginning of Apple devices always watching us. No, not just monitoring what we're inputting into the device or where we're going, but actually watching us. I think there's a fine line between detecting your face and looking to see what you're doing.
And what if your future, all-seeing phone gets hacked? The hacker can watch you as well as Apple! OK, so I'm beginning to sound like Fox Mulder, so I'll go and Google some more conspiracy theories. Hit the iFixit explanation after the jump.
#SkyNET #GhostInTheMachine #HAL9000