[Santosh83]

> Our users tell us they find the Google Assistant to be smart, user-friendly, and reliable, and that’s so important for ambient technology. Interactions need to feel natural and intuitive. Here’s an example: if you want to listen to music, the experience should be the same whether you are in the kitchen, you are driving in your car, or hanging out with friends. No matter what you are doing, you should be able to just say the name of the song and the music just plays without you having to pull out a phone and tap on screens or push buttons.

This may be an unpopular sentiment, but at least for me, I find a certain indefinable pleasure in manual tasks, to a certain extent. Slipping a CD into a player or a cassette into a deck or having to browse through a shelf to find the book I want. I don't think people will realise the "ambience" of these minor things we do hundreds of times a day almost unconsciously until practically everything becomes voice/thought activated and almost anything you want is delivered right to where you are. I believe that there is a certain happy medium between entirely manual and being too automated. Obviously this will be different for different tasks but we must keep in mind that the aim of corporations will always be to make them fully automated because that way they and their services become indispensable for the world. Our aim should be to try to tread the happy medium where automation makes significant difference but does not turn us into instantly-gratified, grown-up children.

[SpicyLemonZest]

You raise a valid concern, but I think there's a stable equilibrium here. It seems to me that the current goals of ambient computing pretty much match the canonical utopian scifi vision; you can order the computer to look up information or play/display whatever media you want, but there are no little robots bringing coffee to your armchair. I don't think we risk automating so much that people (or, well, wealthy people at least) never have to stand up.

[jwhitlark]

I wonder if this feeling plays into the comfort of noun-verb over verb-noun that is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271212

[blackflame]

There will always be a market for one man to foster another man's laziness.

Edit: Not sure how this is even debatable down-voters?