Apple’s Shortcuts will flip the switch on Siri’s potential
Cognitive science has a term called &quot;Theory of Mind&quot; (ToM), which refers a human cognitive ability that typically emerges in 4 year olds (In fact there is a famous experiment you should look up and try if you have any kids&#x2F;nieces&#x2F;nephews around that age), whereby humans are able to formulate the mind of another entity (the capacity it&#x27;s working at; information it holds, and doesn&#x27;t). This is what allows us to, for example, tell a lie. It also allows us to modify our approach in the way we communicate with dogs vs children vs adults, for better communication efficacy (or two different adults where one has high and one has low expertise in some domain, like programming).<p>In my opinion the biggest thing preventing me from using siri is not what it can and cannot do, but that it has been nearly impossible for me to develop a ToM for Siri. And since I simply dont know what siri is capable of, I only use this bot for a very narrow set of tasks. Furthermore one of my ToM priors for siri is that she has a mind that is incapable of learning. This is a big turnoff - bigger than i think we acknowledge; since we are used to interacting with entities that can, even if laboriously. For instance my Australian shepherd might not be able to bring me the newspaper; but if I really wanted her to do that task, I could slowly get her to approximate that behavior, and it would probably be satisfying to see progress in performance. With siri, I simply assume there are things she can do and things she cannot, and it&#x27;d be pointless to try and goad her into adding even a trivial task to her functional repertoire.