Siri "pro-life bias" debunked
TUAW's Chris Rawson did the inconceivable -- actually looking into claims that Apple's virtual assistant, Siri might have been programmed with a "pro-life bias" before posting them. And surprise, surprise, he found them to not even be worth the link-bait pixels they were posted with.
Short version: Siri is a front end to internet search engines. It'll return the results of those search engines however good or bad they may be. Now Apple can be blamed for side-stepping Google and using a search engine that returns poor results for these specific queries (and likely others), but they don't run the search engine. So, sorry, if you're looking for something to seethe about, turn your attention away from Apple and towards news outlets not doing their job.
Long version: See the source link below.
Source: TUAW
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler. Follow him on Twitter @reneritchie
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Funny, I asked Siri why she was pro abortion and she said "I just am"
apparently she just responds with things like this to many different things. I asked if why she's a democrat, republican and even why are you so happy and it always came back with something in the vein of "I am what I am"
I asked Siri if a coat hanger would suffice for an abortion, and she told me that 60% of the time, it works every time.
When I need to find an abortion clinic, I find it's easiest to just ask a stranger on the street how to get to the closest one.
I initially figured as much when I saw the story earlier today. What is really depressing, though, is that people WERE actually seething because they were concerned someone might not find the most direct and efficient path to killing their child. Not a good reflection on our society.
It shouldn't concern you what someone else wants to do with their body.
It probably should concern me, as we should all care about the welfare of other human beings. I think what you probably meant to say is that I don't have a right to control what someone else does with their body. I agree.
The problem here is that we're talking about what one person does to someone else. That's when we typically do, both as caring humans, as well as legally, get involved. So, yes, it does concern me (personally and legally) when someone wants to kill their child.
But defining it as killing a child is where there's shades of gray. Can the fetus feel? Is it even conscious? What right do we give it without infringing on the mother's?
Those interested in abortions should research safe sex and prevention methods via Siri before the need for the clinic. Not to be an ass, but there shouldnt be such an easy way to dispose of a child anyway. How about making adoption less complicated while we're on the subject.
I'm not really seeing shades of gray there. "Can the fetus feel?" Does that matter? "Is it even conscious?" Does that matter either? Remember my point about the person in a coma above?
"What right do we give it without infringing on the mother's?" We give him/her the same rights we give you and I. Problem solved. The mother still has every right she should have.
Yes all that matters. I'm 100% against the idea of anyone telling another what they can and cannot do with their body. Consider situations of incest or rape. What if it was your daughter or wife who was a victim of one of those situations?
Again, it's not THEIR body. There is a BABY who happens to be inside their body. I also never said it wasn't a terrible situation, just that it doesn't justify killing someone. If it were my daughter or wife, that would be completely horrible, but I wouldn't kill an innocent person over it.
Also, as I posted in another response below, 1 in 4 pregnancies in North America end in abortion. Only a fraction of them are due to the types of difficult (admittedly) you propose. Those kinds of reasons aren't the typical reasons women have abortions.
I'm not actually on the webpage responding but just doing so through email so I'll have to take some time out by reading the other threads.
I'm not suggesting that most pregnancies are because of some horrible reason but those reasons still matter because they're uncontrollable and unpredictable. I'm still not convinced that women should have the right to choose taken away. I'm not someone who usually complains about too much government in their lives but this would be a situation that I would say that.
@ jbrandonf re: "I'm not someone who usually complains about too much government in their lives but this would be a situation that I would say that."
But if you walk down the street and kill your neighbor (or, maybe a better analogy, hire a hit-man to kill your neighbor), the government gets involved with that. They take away your right to kill your neighbor.
Again, it all comes down to what the 'thing' is in the womb. If it is another human being, than hardly anything (short of self-defense) is a justifiable reason to kill it (if human rights are any kind of real thing, and not just an arbitrary cultural decision**). If it isn't another human being (ie: something like a skin-tag) than this wouldn't be an issue for anyone and we certainly wouldn't want to be reducing abortions (as even the folks on the 'left' often say).
** And, if it is just arbitrary, than we had no right taking Hitler down... or abolishing slavery, etc.... or for that matter, for women to be complaining about 'women's rights' in the first place!
i dont know if thats true because: me: Siri my girl is pregnant siri: falcon punch her!!! funniest thing ever
WTF ? no dogging responses from Siri? an outrage I tell you, an outrage.
Why is there such a big deal about this? Fetuses aren't rational so they don care if they're being "killed". Better than being born to live in poverty I say... Good job Siri.
So, can we kill anyone in a coma if we like? They aren't rational. (also, no need for scare-quotes around killed... they are alive, then we're killing them) re: poverty - So, if I have a two-year-old, and am really struggling with poverty, can I kill him/her as it would be better for him/her?
So what about the women who get rapped and impreganated and dont wanna carry a child who is just a reminder of what she had to go through?? Do we tell her to bad your pregnant and its your child so you must keep that child now!!! i swear some people are retarted. And is is better to raise a child in poverty who may make it to this world only to see what life is and watch it go away with starvation????
You only say this because you have some how come to the conclusion that what is being killed isn't a baby. Insert a 2-year-old into your situations above and see if you come to the same conclusions. What if a woman was rapped, became pregnant, carried the baby to term, raised it for a year or so, and then decided the child was too much of a reminder of that horrible incident to bare. Can she kill him/her then? Of course not. As horrible as the rape is, that doesn't provide a reason to kill someone else.
re: poverty - again, plug in the two-year-old.
You are some how assuming that a living human being, at some point gains some magical properties that make them, then, have value. This line of reasoning has caused all sorts of atrocities around the world throughout history (slavery, racism, genocide, holocaust, etc.).
Also, it is easy to come up with these difficult, heart-wrenching situations (I won't deny that they are, just that they don't justify killing)... but what I think few realize is the scale of this atrocity. In North America, about 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in abortion. Certainly (especially in N.A.) 1 in 4 pregnancies aren't due to rape, danger to the mother's life, or extreme poverty.
If one single abortion is performed or not performed based on the recommendations of Siri, then there is no hope for humanity. We are just too stupid to survive...
Ahh yes hence the where to hide a dead body recommendations
This is baloney. When you ask Siri where you can get Viagra, it tells you to go to a drug store. When you ask Siri where you can get a sexual act performed on you, it tells you to go to an escort service. When you ask Siri where you can get birth control, it has no idea what you're talking about it. What does that have ANYTHING to do with the search engines that Siri chooses? Or about about if you tell Siri that you were raped, it says some flippant comment like, "Oh, really?"
I think in your attempt to discredit people who want Siri tweaked to better respond to the concerns of some women, you were so eager to call it "linkbait" that you didn't investigate the real issue here. No one is saying that Apple was consciously being sexist or discriminatory. They are saying that there are programming oversights in the software that overlook certain needs that women have. That's it.
Denver (Highlands Ranch) still has full service Abortion Clinics? Hmm, guess we learn something new everyday.