Aaaaand were calling people stupid now.
I doubt you have any experience in the field of AI. I, however, have years of education in neurobiology and neuroscience in general as well as years of experience in computer programming, including building convolutional neural networks. So please, if anyone should realize that they are ill equipped to speak on this topic, it should be you.
We are actually very close to building human level intelligence AI. IBM recently built a neural simulation with far more neurons than contained in the human brain. With some fine tuning of the models, a more accurate map of an actual human brain, we really aren't that far away.
There's a phenomenon called emergent complexity. This phenomenon allows simple bees to weigh an enormous number of factors when deciding the best place to build a hive, and they usually come pretty close to the mathematically ideal place. AI is likely to work the same way. It only takes a few dumb components to create a breathtakingly complex and rich system.
Regardless of what you think, a large scale effort to make Siri smarter is a much better idea than an Apple car, simply because a flaw in Siri won't kill people, among a hundred other enormous reasons. Google recently invested in DeepMind, one of the best investments I've seen in recent years, and if Apple continues to ignore the field of deep learning and neural networks they're in for a very rude awakening very soon, especially when Google integrates this tech into Android and Google Now. Google Now is pretty much equal to Siri in capability today, but when they add in DeepMind tech it will be 100x more useful and far more impressive.
