Mariana Mazzucato

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The number that made me flinch was not about artificial intelligence. It was about Siri.

Siri — the voice assistant that Apple unveiled in 2011 as a flagship feature of the iPhone 4S, the product that cemented Apple's reputation as the most innovative company on Earth. Siri was a DARPA project. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, developed at the Stanford Research Institute with public money, spun out as a startup, and acquired by Apple twenty-four months before launch. The touchscreen beneath Siri was developed at publicly funded laboratories. The GPS that told Siri where you were standing came from a twelve-billion-dollar constellation of military satellites. The internet that carried Siri's queries to Apple's servers was built by the Department of Defense.

I knew these facts individually.