The amazing success of Siri and the resulting stranglehold AI-powered technology has on humans day-to-day lives makes Siri co-inventor Tom Gruber extremely nervous. Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Tom Gruber is a vastly successful psychologistpossibly one of the most successful of all time. This is because a creation of his happens to be a very large, very ongoing and continuously expanding experiment. If you have an iPhone in your pocket or in your hand, you co-exist with his creation. You may not be able to live without it. And that, Gruber recently told Willamette Week, isnt good!

Gruber is a co-inventor of Siri, the artificial intelligence-powered assistant that uses machine learning to answer billions of queries every week, according to the Computer History Museum. Gruber and his partners sold Siri, a Norse term that roughly translates as beautiful woman who leads you to victory, in 2010 to Apple for a reported $200 million.

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In the years since, Siri has become near-ubiquitous. And where you cannot find Siri, you may find a clone, like Amazons Alexa or whatever Android-powered genie you summon with the magic words, Hey, Google.

The amazing success of Siri and the resulting stranglehold AI-powered technology has on humans day-to-day lives makes Gruber extremely nervous, he recently told the Portland-based alt-weekly. Like a digital Dr. Frankenstein, Gruber is increasingly wary and horrified at what he hath wrought, a science experiment gone wrong, according to the paper.

In certain areas, AI can already demonstrably outperform humans, hes said before, according to a talk he gave last year in London. And its one thing to create a product, but its another thing to have an entire generation transformed by this technology.

Former chief of the Siri digital assistant team at Apple Tom Gruber speaks at the TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada, on April 25, 2017. GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP via Getty Images

Our millennials check their phones 150 times a day, he noted in a recent interview he gave WW ahead of a lecture on AI he plans to deliver at TechfestNW. (Since his exit from Apple in 2018, Gruber has spent much of his time on the lecture circuit, delivering a 2017 TED talk as well.) So far, rather than fix humanitys illsliteral or spiritualAIs main contribution to the species is that it has shown that if you want to get two billion people addicted to something thats not good for them, you can do it, he told the paper.

The analogy may not be perfect, but Gruber compared the devotees of the worlds religions, whoat maximumpray five times a day, or merely attend services once a weekto the adherents of technology companies, with their billions of users logging on throughout the day, every day. That makes Google or Facebook the worlds biggest religions. So who does that make Godand who are the prophets? And which of them are machinesand if theyre all machines, what does it all mean?

The uncanny valley is the term coined to describe the gulf between human behavior and a machine that uses AI and machine learning to behave like a human. By some metrics, the valley has narrowed, perhaps to a mere chasm. As Gruber has pointed out (and many agree), AI-powered medical diagnostics are outperforming human doctorsand AI-powered marketing is very, very good at getting humans to buy things.

More recently, AI creep has appeared in the humanities. An AI-drawn picture was sold at auction at Christies last year for $432,500. One of Grubers recent projects, an AI music startup called LifeScore of which he is co-founder and CTO, promises to make music that sounds just like a human created it. Yet another is Humanistic AI, in which Gruber is attempting to help companies use machine learning to harmlessly cooperate with humans rather than supplant or dominate the species.

Despite all this, Gruber remains an AI optimistbecause, he pointed out, hes a human optimist. Facebooks programming is bad at discerning real news from fake newsbut its employees are pretty good at it. Twitter is policed by people, not machines.

While it seems, very clearly, that the endgame for most large tech firms is to eliminate the human factorself-driving cars, digital assistantsit seems clear that people are the best option to police social networks. And likewise, if people use AI as a prosthesis or a supplement rather than a replacement, there may be hope for the future of both.

The ways in which AI is abused, he told WW, is to benefit humanscertain humans, those concerned with advertising dollars going up or human-resource costs going down.

Thus, the only real problem with artificial intelligence appears to be human nature. And what could go wrong there?

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Siri Co-Inventor: The Internet Is a Vast Psychology ExperimentAnd It Scares Me - Observer