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Comment by jhp123 | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Facebook's "M" assistant from 2017.

> Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-v...

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Just like nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, you can find a handyman and schedule an appointment with a voice assistant / chatbot in 6 months, and everyone will use self driving cars in 5 years.

I was a little kid when a local university came out with news that they had a big breakthrough in Cold Fusion. I remember my mom telling me it was going to change everything and we would travel around the world on invisible rails.

Many years later the worlds richest man is digging short tunnels to drive electric vehicles in.

My father always joked about the statements they made when they opened the first fission power plants, "Energy that's too cheap to meter!"

They weren't unreasonable - they just didn't predict the whole world going collectively insane after Chernobyl, and choosing to pay for being slowly suffocated and cooked to death instead.

My house, not too far from Three Mile Island, was built between its commissioning and the incident with reactor 2. As a result, its builders installed the most insane heating system known to man: resistive heating in the ceiling. Crank it all you want, your feet will still be cold. It’s a system that could only possibly be acceptable if electricity doesn’t cost anything.

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