I was mortified by Cortana auto-extracting todos from private emails but my father in his late 50’s said it was neat and very useful for him. So it goes.
Long term this is definitely something I want from my personal AI assistant, filtering out all kinds of annoyance/tedium from my life, so I totally understand how your father could like it. The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.
> The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.
I don't trust them because I know that they're reporting to their real bosses, who aren't me. If I could have a personal assistant that was completely local and under my control, I'd begin to get interested in them.
When it is locally done, I find it hard to see what isn't too like. That is, if I open an email and it asks if I want to make a reminder or add it to my calendar, that is cool.
When I see that several emails I have not opened are already on my calendar, I am less happy about it.
I don’t really see what’s different, honestly. They’re moving it from one system they control to another, big deal. Plus who says I even saw the original e-mail?
If they have given a side channel to impact my calendar, that will cause issues.
Sure, for many folks this will be fine. But it seems an unnecessary denial of service attack vector that needs more engineering to protect than makes sense.
I would guess in the many years they've had this they've had to iron out some issues, but allowing you to receive e-mail at all is a denial of service attack vector.