[pjerem]

As someone suffering from severe inattentive ADHD, I can see a great potential in the rise of really smart personal assistants which could aggregate every single data point in my life and throw the information at me when needed.

But that’s the only thing I could imagine and it must be local not to be a privacy nightmare. Because I have no doubt that Google and Amazon are already working on that.

For anything else, I just agree with you and the author. It will just make capitalism worse.

[projektfu]

This is kind of what kills me about the current crop of assistants. They all make my ADHD life harder, not easier. The Google Assistant, for example, cannot handle the few obvious things I ask. "Send an email to Jim." Nope. "Record my weight in Google fit." Nope. It won't look at any calendar that's not a Google calendar. It puts other people's flights on my schedule. It tells me I've got good traffic an hour before rush hour, but doesn't give me an update as it gets worse. I've probably wasted more time trying to get it to work than it's ever saved me. And it's twice as good as Siri was.

I'm always getting reminders about bills I've auto-paid, that Google has dug up from the bowels of my email, and yet I still find myself scrambling on things I forgot about.

I'm highly unimpressed by anything other than the incredible confidence with which these systems will lie. Online and phone support is bad enough, AI will not make it better, not because they can't make an AI that could figure out that you need a technician to come, but because corporate won't trust the AI to not deliver a pony along with them. And who could blame them? As soon as they give AI any power it will become the tool of the stainless steel rat. Instead, it will continue to be used to fend off support calls and fudge internal metrics, just like the last round of automated support.

[pjerem]

> The Google Assistant, for example, cannot handle the few obvious things I ask.

Oh my, I think you are not ready for Siri.

[supriyo-biswas]

If the model of streaming services is anything to go by, the LLM would be offered as a paid subscription with ads.

[yomlica8]

And once ads are involved, the perverse incentives will mean the assistant will begin pushing you toward advertised products.