Re: Kieren, out of interest, how old are you?
Perhaps our views have been informed by science fiction... we have watched films in which people interact with disembodied voices. Most famously perhaps, HAL 9000 from 2001:Space Odyssey, or more recently Jarvis from the Iron Man films. The former is dangerous, because it was given poorly thought-through orders by human bureaucrats, the latter benign because it was built by its user.
We also have Colossus: The Forbin Project.
The original Cortana, from the Halo video games was a goody, but the game's developers Bungie have a history of using 'powerful AI gone haywire' as a plot driver (see 'Marathon'). In the video game, Cortana is a military ship AI, providing information pertinent to tactical decisions; in reality, Siri, Cortana et al grew out of research done for the US DOD to triage information for battlefield commanders.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
