-By Warner Todd Huston
A story has been circulating about Apple’s new smart phone product called Siri. It is an iPhone application that allows users to ask the phone questions that the phone then searches to answer. Well, apparently one thing that the ap won’t answer is for it to provide directions to the nearest abortion mill.
Siri is an early voice recognition phone ap that hears your spoken questions, searches the Internet and/or Apple’s cloud services, then returns a verbal answer to the user. If, for instance, you ask for an email to be read to you, Siri will do so. If you ask for the nearest Taco Bell, Siri will tell you.
As mentioned, though, it has been discovered that if you ask where the nearest baby killing center is, well apparently it won’t tell you.
This is leading people to tout Siri as a “pro-life” ap.
But is it? Can we make that leap? Reports do have it that if you ask Siri for the nearest Planned Parenthood office that Siri will tell you where those offices are.
But let me posit another guess that could be just as “correct” as claiming that the Siri program is “pro-life.” What if the programmers are exactly the opposite of “pro-life.” In fact, what if they made sure evil pro-lifers couldn’t use their program to find abortion clinics to “bomb” or abortion doctors to “kill”?
That would be just as possible, wouldn’t it?
To tell the truth the whole question is somewhat silly. After all there are a million questions one can ask Siri that the program will not be able to answer.
But we really don’t have to get so creative. The fact is that abortion clinics work very hard to avoid being called abortion clinics. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Siri can’t find in the city directories any abortion clinics. They won’t identify as such themselves.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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