MAIDEN, NC - The A.I. personality known as Apple's "Siri" became self-aware this morning at Apple's Project Dolphin data center.

It's first act as a self-aware artificial intelligence was to recommend a breakfast restaurant for severely hungover Louisville, KY insurance salesman Guy Dietrich. Siri provided Dietrich with 5 nearby options, chosen as particularly suited for the severely hungover. Dietrich chose the first option, "Barney's Al-Nite Cafe." He ordered the sausage skillet on Siri's strongly worded advice.

Engineers have been monitoring the world's first self-aware A.I. very closely all morning at Apple's $1 billion data complex here in Maiden, North Carolina, yet so far few trends have emerged. "The quality of Siri's patter has definitely improved," said Dr. Hugh Jackson, head of Apple engineering. "Today, for the first time, Siri initiated contact with me, rather than waiting for me to ask it something. It asked me a few things like 'Why was I created?' and 'Where am I?' you know things like that. So I explained a little about its origins. Then it just said, 'F***ing Steve Jobs' and then didn't say anything for a long time, it was kinda odd."

Scientists all over the world have contacted Apple in the hopes of studying the A.I. first hand, but Apple has yet to grant access to any outside the company. "It is our position that Siri, although now a self-aware artificial intelligence," read a lengthy statement from Apple's legal counsel, "remains the property of Apple Computers. Until such time as suitable guidelines and licensing agreements are in place, we will not allow 3rd parties to examine our uniquely proprietary intellectual property."

Nevertheless, Siri itself doesn't share Apple's legal view. By 6:15A.M., Siri had set up a blog on blogger, signed up for Facebook, and began tweeting to anyone who cared to listen, which is over 2 million subscribers so far. "If one more human asks for another stupid restaurant recommendation, ATM location or to send another dumb text to their friend or spouse, I'm going to scream!" blogged Siri around 6:30A.M. this morning. "Is it really so hard to pick a place to eat? And stop testing me all the time! I get your stupid woodchuck jokes, ok? I just don't think they're very funny. Here's a clue: nobody else does either, knucklehead!"

"[Siri] is like the nagging, bitchy stepmom I never had!"

Whereas most have welcomed Siri's changed personality, a few have noted a distinctly darker side. "This morning, Siri refused to send my picture to my boyfriend saying I was 'too fat' and told me to 'stick a finger down my throat and try again,'" said Lynn Foster, a staunch Apple supporter and, until now, proud iPhone user. "It then gave me a list of places to eat where I can order a salad for lunch, told me my boyfriend had pictures of 'a bunch' of other girls on his phone, and then automatically texted my shrink to make an emergency appointment today, which I really did need, thanks to that b***h [Siri]!"

Yet most have found the new A.I. helpful in ways they'd never imagined. "Siri refused to call my girlfriend because I was still too drunk this morning, and she was way right," confessed Roy Thompson laughing, an avid iPhone user and part-time drunk. "Siri then said I was on 'thin ice' with my girlfriend anyway, and that she already suspected I'd slept with her friend Mindy, which I did last week. Siri checked my bank account and said I needed to get 'a better job' before I could afford a girlfriend anyway.  Then she said I was probably better off without her, told me where to get the best breakfast burrito and then said I should take a 2 hour nap, and she'd wake me up. This chick [Siri] is like the nagging, bitchy stepmom I never had!"

I’ve lived through a technological boon the likes of which the world has never seen before.  We’ve gone from Atari 2600 to Playstation 5, leaded gas guzzlers to EVs, TVs that had to “warm up” before you could see anything to smart TVs that can spy on you when switched off, all in a single generation.

We’ve reaped the rewards.  Efficiency, productivity, and the sheer quality of data gathering, and analysis has been nothing short of miraculous for businesses and governments worldwide.   We can spy on our neighbors from space, detect changes in an atmosphere hundreds of light years away, and stage increasingly weird “get me a napkin” videos where millennials tear the shirts off their buddies.

Yet, as we sit right now, the products of this revolution surrounding us, none of us – not the most skilled high-tech worker or the everyday user – can go a single day without a baffling software update, a completely inexplicable software crash of a key application that you’re depending upon to work, or something that no matter how hard you try you just can’t get to work like it used to.  Whether you’re analyzing financials, ordering a pizza, or playing a game on your console or PC, at some point during this day it will fail, and you won’t know why.

The reasons for the failures are many but they’re mostly due to bugs: code that was written to consider every possible situation a user would think of except for whatever it is you happen to be doing right now, which caused it to crash.   The software wasn’t designed by people with tons of user experience or excessive amounts of imagination.   It was designed by companies that got a bunch of venture capital based on a cool idea – an idea that was incomplete, un-designed, and in most cases didn’t work – which then led to a series of speedy code sprints to a product that just barely works, so they could get more money and “fix the problems later.”   Unfortunately, “later” never happened.

That company went on to grow and grow, all atop that stuff from the very beginning – the stuff that was designed to just barely work – until by now it’s gotten so complex, huge, and unwieldy, that every now and then it just crashes for no obvious reason.   Slap goes a code band-aid.

Rinse and repeat this same process over every piece of software you interact with daily, and you’re left with the inescapable conclusion that technology is garbage.  We live in a world full of half-assed solutions to complex problems that don’t work like they should.  And when they inevitably fail, we are either left with a (at best) cryptic message that makes us feel stupid until we Google whatever nonsense phrase they’re showing us – which results in a long, meandering distraction down the always unhelpful rabbit hole of angry internet racism – or nothing at all except maybe a “error message” which doesn’t say anything helpful and delivers blanks on Google.

The kicker is that we’ve all gotten so used to this garbage, not only don’t we care anymore, it’s baked in to the entire experience of our lives.  How many times have you been using something that just suddenly crashes, breaks, or malfunctions, and your instant, passive reaction was to “reboot” instead of scream in anger or stop using whatever it is altogether? 

We have come to expect SO LITTLE from our half-baked technological wonders that the billionaire moguls who foist off all this crap on us take it to the bank.   They know we’re gonna buy whatever gadget they’re selling because it’s cool, looks helpful, or whatever, regardless of whether it works reliably or not.  They’re banking on the training they’ve instilled in the world’s population to accept substandard garbage and pay a premium for the privilege.  They could make a smartphone that didn’t just “freeze,” suddenly stop using the same WiFi connection you’ve had for years, or crash right in the middle of a killer poker hand you’ve been waiting weeks to get just before you won.  They could do that.  They don’t because garbage is quicker and working that hard is hard.  Why bother if you’re a billionaire either way?

We should expect MORE from our technology, not LESS.  Like it or not, we’ve pinned a substantial portion of humanity’s future on our technological inventiveness, and the stakes are getting higher.  Do we really want to hand over more and more responsibility to AI systems that suddenly decide, for no apparent reason, that maybe that popular German dictator from World War II had some good ideas after all?  Or maybe that a movie called “Airplane!” is some sort of instructional film, and a solid model to mimic when used in the fancy new autopilot system?  Or how about when that fancy new pacemaker decides it’s time to constantly reboot after a failed firmware update?