Apple bought Siri and hired the world's leading expert in HAL-like artificial intelligence robots to lead its iPhone engineering team for only one reason: Apple knows phones will evolve into virtual personal assistants.

Apple's advantage is that it's good at integrating functionality and making it seamless and elegant. The company is also disciplined about rolling out only the aspects of new technology that are ready for prime time. So we can expect HAL to be integrated into our phones one feature at a time.

But Apple isn't the only company with an advantage.

The movie HAL performed its amazing feats in part because it had access to a lot of data. He was able to monitor all computer and spaceship systems.