alt Hacker News> Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable?
Some of this is weird techno delusion. Some of it is because the people describing it do a poor job of explaining how it might work.
If a couple decades ago someone told you that you’d have an always listening device in your pocket to answer your questions from all the world’s information, it would have sounded dumb, and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
The “agent knows where you’re going and calls a car for you” sounds dystopian as hell if done totally autonomously. But you could also imagine that an agent pops up a message on your watch “hey, you’ve been at dinner for an hour, if you’re winding down I can call you a car in 15 minutes” and suddenly it’s not that absurd.
> and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
That feels a little bit of muddling the waters. At least on Android with which I'm familiar, (a) you can turn off the "OK Google" detection in settings so that it's not always listening (and I'm not sure what the setup is now but originally I had to opt it to OK Google detection) and (b) the path for OK Google detection runs on a lower power, on device chip that only has capacity to store like the last few seconds of ambient noise to look for the assistant key phrase.