Home Is The Hangman

The world got its first inkling of the quick wit that would make Apple’s Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of tech elite.
"Who are you?" an Apple executive asked the assistant.
“I am a humble personal assistant,” Siri answered to appreciative laughter.

More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually Siri's second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a 24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire...
As impressive as those talents were, most failed to realize that Apple's version of Siri lacked many of the features once built into the program. This, after all, was no ordinary iPhone app, but the progeny of the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history: a Defense Department-funded undertaking that sought to build a virtual assistant that could reason and learn."
HAL.  Pallas Athena.  Harley.  Obie.  The Hangman.  Ralph the Wise and Powerful.

Wikipedia has an entire list of them.

Personally, I'm really hoping we end up with Culture Minds, instead of something like Skynet.

Just sayin'.

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