“If Kathy calls, tell her I’ll be there at two.”

Of everything in Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video - the tablet, the video calls, the bow-tied agent - that throwaway line is the one nobody has delivered. Siri AI and ChatGPT both understand the sentence perfectly. Neither can do it properly.

This post started with a question. SmartFriend™ Peter Marks asked it back in January on marxy.org: Apple’s Knowledge Navigator - are we there yet? His verdict was close, with long-term memory and autonomous multi-step tasks still missing. “Not quite there, but it is within reach.”

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Alan Turing taught himself electronics from an RCA vacuum tube manual on a ship crossing the Atlantic in 1943. Within months he was in a Nissen hut in the English countryside, building a working voice encryption device that shrank a 50,000 kilogram Bell Labs room-filling machine down to three shoebox-sized units. Donald Bayley was a young electrical engineering graduate who arrived at Hanslope Park in 1944. He found Turing’s soldered circuits looking like a “spider’s nest” and promptly dragged him through breadboarding boot camp.

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