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>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message.

>We could argue whether or not everyone getting their own AI admin assistant is good or bad for society (will everyone just have their assistants talk to each other, and no one will talk directly anymore?) But I must admit, I hate dealing with non-friends/family in communications that involve transactions. There's nothing I hate more than having to book stuff, call customer service, or write emails to service departments.

The thing is, if I had to point to a problem I have in life and for which I'd be willing to pay for a solution, a lack of a secretary and excessive personal admin stuff is simply not it. This is solving a problem that, at least to my eyes, only the powerful actually have.

Speak for yourself.

Sure sure. The question is how large a market people like you actually make up, since companies like Google usually want to make products that can reach as many people as possible.

I doubt it's unusual. My father used to solve this problem by making my mother make all the calls, but that is a harder sell these days.

The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care.

It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one.

That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laundry and a load of dishes each day while the kids were having naps. If we were low on detergent or supplies that the kids needed, we gave her cash and she'd pick it up on her way in. If somebody needed to be at the house for some reason, she was there and neither my wife nor I had to remove ourselves from work to take care of it.

We literally came home from work, ate dinner, played with the kids. When the weekends came around we didn't have to dedicate a chunk of it to laundry/cleaning.

It was pretty fantastic.

I can only imagine how having a actual assistant would take things to the next level.

All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet.

When Google can call my cable company, wade through the phone tree and get a service appointment or issue resolved...I'll be all over it. Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me.

Those are the time wasters I'd want saved. What Google is doing here is equivalent of automating the functionality that people pay for with OnStar.

Seconded ;-) a few years in the UK ago I was a committee that ran the national raft race for an organisation like rotoract (the youth side of rotary) about a hundred teams and 1500 participants over the weekend (we also laid on camping and entertainment for the 3 days).

One of the other members was the PA to the chief fire officer for the county (State in us terms) and they where so efficient it was amazing.

At the first meeting before it started they had already worked out what formal letters need to be written updated them from last year and got the other committee members to sign - two copies on to send an done for the file.

I'm curious where you live. In my area, a "nanny" is exclusively or childcare (and well paid, including Social Security and Unemployment premiums), with no meal prep or laundry. We "cleaned the house for the nanny" to avoid embarrassment. Honestly it felt more like we were charitable sponsors to an underemployed youth (in exchange for having someone fulfill the obligation of keeping the toddler accompanied) than we were hiring an employee.

It's a far cry from the do-everything (and possibly cash-under-the-table) servant help I've seen in the past/elsewhere.

We started out with childcare only and then after she'd been there for about a month offered a $2 / hr increase if she was up for the load of laundry + dishes.

I live in the Greenville, SC area and we went through a local screening and hiring service here that also helps people find baby sitters.

> All that said, the types of phone calls that Google is talking about making here aren't that beneficial...yet.

Even scheduling appointments as in their demo can be really beneficial. My wife and I both work, I have flexibility to make calls during the day but she really doesn't. As a teacher she's constantly having her lunch or short breaks while the kids are at recess taken up by work issues. A surprising number of places are also closed shortly after she gets off work as well. Yesterday she tried to make an appointment with her doctors office and spent her full ten minute recess time on hold. She did end up getting through after school right before they closed but spent an additional ten minutes on hold. None of our doctors, dentists, barbers/stylists have online booking systems. The doctors offices have automated appointment reminder systems but that's it.

> Even just wading through the phone tree and sitting on hold until an actual person is reached and then handing it back off to me.

This doesn't work for someone in her situation. There are a ton of hourly workers that are in the same boat. I showed my wife the demo of duplex last night and her responses were that it was amazing and unfortunate that it wasn't available yet.

I believe the last half of your message (ie. a virtual assistant) is going to be really big in the future.

It should be able to handle basically any rote tech interaction for you, from shopping, people screening, service issues, non-personal mails, you name it. If for example the back-end service issue channel on a shop ran a matching protocol then the issue could be logged in fractions of a second, the savings in time for both you and the company in question would be huge. (Of course raising problems if you can't afford your own assistant and now need to call in manually to the 3 human operators that are still employed).

Combine that with a physical assistant (robot) that can handle the physical tasks such as bringing the shopping inside and storing it, managing cleaning etc and you're going to have a winning combo.

So you enjoy being on hold for long periods of time and having to deal with unhelpful customer service representatives?

I’ve previously posted (to surprisingly supportive reception) about my Dad’s collection of letters from 1956-1966 while traveling some 4 million miles around the world in the navy and State Department. Some might find it interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d...

Separately, my grandfather (on my Mom’s side) was likely one of those “elites” having been a named partner of an AM100 law Firm. His birthday cards always ended “dictated not read.” Now you to can be as detached and impersonal with your very own ai personal assistant.

That's fantastic. “dictated not read.” means "I didn't have time to check that this is correct, please speed extra of your unimportant time to proofread for me." What a birthday gift!

To be fair, though, if the message was nice, dictation is t really an alternative to a telephone message which is also dictated but not so derided.

In this instance he dictated the card to his assistant who in turn wrote the card/message.

This is old school legal professional formatting where the Initials of the assistant followed my grandfather’s name identifying which assistant typed the dictation.

He was smart, formal, thoughtful and a great sense of humor. Most of me thinks he did it as one day I would find the humor in it.

It’s highly amusing to me that you didn’t proofread your comment.

Having read the description on the Amazon page, this sounds precisely like the type of candid material i seek in general. Is there any non-kindle format available for purchase?

There is an EPub version, which was for sale on the website (http://dearmomebook.com) which was set up using a free Weebly account, but with all the freemium account changes, it no longer appears to be up.

The length of a single piece of communication might be a function of bandwidth. If my only way to reach you is by a handwritten letter that must travel by ship across an ocean, I'm probably going to say more than "Yo."

Edit: joshuamorton made the same point while I was working on this comment.

The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit.

Really? I see a flourishing of detailed video content, much of which is interesting and fairly information dense.

Examples:

Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ

CGP Grey. Rules for Rulers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Granted, that these are really pointers to other sources, in many cases text sources.

Cost/Benefit is a big factor! Remember: The street finds its own uses for things.

> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit.

Maybe, but you could choose to be optimistic and interpret it as getting communication closer to what it is in real life - I don't expound to my friends when I'm with them in real life; a lot of our communication is carried out through expressions and gestures. "IRL Emoji", some future archeologist/sociologist could call it.

I know lots of people will roll their eyes at the old man who complains and shakes his cane about the decline of long-form communication and the thoughtfulness of written correspondence. But I don't care if they think I'm paranoid and silly. I think it's a damn shame to replace common literacy and writing with tweets and autocomplete that eventually just takes over for you entirely.

Here's the thing about these little conveniences and timesavers they're building. I think it's a sliding scale. Now we think it's inconvenient to call and put in a reservation or write an email to somebody. They'll fix that. Then we'll think the next most onerous thing is inconvenient. The truth is, we have extremely cush lives right now as it is. We're not going to use this to save time and do better things, become better people. We're going to use it to lazily shrink from society and become even more obsessed with electronic trivialities. Just like me writing this bitter comment right now. It's the continuation of an obvious trend.

Writing itself is a convenience and time saver to avoid memorizing and repeated vocal recitation. I don't disagree that there is a continued march of convenience, I'm just not convinced that there is any justification to the idea that there is a “this far and no further” point at which thst March stops being a net gain, and even less coonvinced that that point is conveniently just before the convenience advanced of the last few years (or even generations).

Yeah, it's been a trend in the past. You think it's linear? You don't see that it's picking up extremely quickly during this generation specifically? Do you think that we should be completely unconcerned about the fact that future generations will have lives completely dissimilar to any previous? And we don't know anything about the consequences.

People have this idea that information technology is so innocent and only improves, never harms. I feel like this field is about to get a reckoning, but it's not going to be something we can undo. I don't think it's crazy to be skeptical and careful about it. I don't think it's a good idea to just assume it's fine and normal.

> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit.

The 3rd most popular podcast¹ regularly lasts 3+ hours. It's typically a conversation between Joe Rogan and a single guest.

¹ The Joe Rogan Experience, according to http://www.podbay.fm/browse/top

I would disagree, if only I because I still write letters.

But then I am one of the people who writes SMS messages long enough that they are unreadable on the recepeint's end.

(And yes, turns out that you can type a long enough SMS message that it wouldn't display fully on a modern Android phone even after the auto-conversion to MMS. That saddens me. I guess you may be right, after all.)

On the other hand, people write more these days than they ever have. And even in this thread, the individual comments end up running quite long - long enough to be short letters if you were to write them by hand. Turns out, when you are actually trying to make a point, being brief is more difficult than being wordy.

So perhaps it's not the art of writing "long-form" (a modern term) that is dying - perhaps it's writing longform intended for one recipient only - and perhaps even that is temporary. Time will tell.

Tl;DR: the decline in long-form text communication is not (necessarily) because people are too lazy to write long-form. They may just be recognizing the futility.

My attempts to use clear and precise longer-form text generally fail to achieve my goal, and readers will respond in ways that the text anticipated and answered, but they didn't read or didn't comprehend the points.

Given a sentence at a time, with 5 or fewer sentences, comprehension improves, though I still have to repeat points and correct wrong conclusions. I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part.

You have to compare the efficiency/accuracy by results, not against some logical but unrealistic ideal.

I've seen this lack of attention/comprehension with the text of others, both as reader and as outside observer, so I know the confusion is not just poor writing on my part.

My wife works in banking, and she's discovered that she has a superpower: She can read large amounts of dense text quickly and comprehend it. Yes, her superpower is reading! Incredible as it sounds, there are lots of C-level people in her field who basically never get past light reading. So basically, she's become an overnight expert/resource to senior people.

Is this a sign of the degradation of our society, or has it always been this way? I suspect it's actually the latter.

Do you think your mom reads more than the CEO? Orperhap CEOs have other obligations so they don't have time to read a whole document in depth. If CEO could do everything alone, there would be no employees. If your mom can do everything alone, she should start a company and get rich off cost savings.

I remember students in my class barely passing comprehensive reading tests. I find it hard to believe that they've improved without the pressure that school/university puts on them.

Which class was this?

I remember being shocked in my Classical Studies class that I was the only one who had read all of Thucydides (only books 6 an d7 where set) let alone doing a lot of reading of related text's

People have been saying the art of letter writing has been declining for a century for a century.[1]

> A hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it.

-- Percy Holmes Boynton, in 1915, 103 years ago

The pace of modern life has been accelerating since before some of our grandparents were born.

[1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1227/

I can never remember exactly how a block letter is even formatted because I write them so infrequently.

This does hint at the root of the matter: letter writing is a format dictated by the constraints of communication. These constraints changed between 1815 and 1915, and are all but gone today - so the format of the communication changes accordingly.

The letters of yore we revere today were written by intellectuals and are fascinating, but that wasn't what all letters were like. The letters written by regular people were as banal as the IM threads exchanged by regular people today. Intellectuals still produce long form material, just not necessarily in letter form.

This same concept, by the way, is why we always say that music from $previous generation is better than music from $current generation. We have access to all of the bad music from today, but the only music we remember from the good old days is the good stuff, this is doubly true if we weren't alive back then. We only have the music that survived because it was good (popular and lasting).

So too has the art of cave painting. We forget that the style and substance of a communication is more often an outcome of the medium than anything else. Letters were long because they needed to be. Postcards were shorter. And in Britain, during the days of multiple mail deliveries, letters too were very short. Emails and IMs are short because they also need to be short.

They don't need to be short. They just don't need to be long.

They need to be short if you want to get it sent before the next post goes out. It needs to be short if you don't have the space on the back of the card. Today's IMs and emails need to be short so that you do not burden the reader. Otherwise email conversations will take so long as to defeat their point.

Given that if you write more than three paragraphs you get slammed with "I'm not reading that wall of text" and that "tl;dr" is a thing, is it surprising that people are employing the short form instead?