[no_wizard]

>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?

Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed”

Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is competent to make determinations within parameters specified.

I could also let them know when it’s inappropriate to do this. Again, they should be competent enough to discern the differences between when it is and isn’t appropriate.

This could honestly be done by an algorithm if you give it the correct inputs and outputs and it could be fed updates, the only real limit is the fact that some of this isn’t exposed via an API either in a timely fashion or at all

[bluGill]

Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so they don't.

That years of training is what we are missing. I don't think modern AIs can be trained in the way the assistants of old could be, at least not yet.

[no_wizard]

I don’t even think you need machine learning for this, it’s an API problem mostly like I said.

Being able to collate the requisite inputs from outside sources is the real problem. If you can’t do that reliably it’s simply hard to build an algorithm around it. Flights for example would require your calendar program to reliably pull data from an API regarding the flight information that is current and effectively real time. That’s the actual hard part, and this expands across services.

For all the advances we have made with computers and smartphones in particular they suck at meaningfully exposing a way to collate data sources and create actions around them reliably

[ziml77]

Personalizing any automation like that is a privacy nightmare. The system needs to know a lot about your preferences and the decisions you'd normally make yourself as well as your current circumstances since those will also influence your choices. How do you feed that into any AI without being problematic for privacy?

Having one running locally helps but it's still necessarily storing information that you might not want to have stored where someone could potentially retrieve it, either via some sort of exploit or by forcibly compelling you to give it up.

[bluGill]

A personal assistant is also a privacy nightmare - to be effective they need to know a lot of personal data about you. But at least a human is one person to blame, automation means you have no idea where the data is or who can abuse it.