Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

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I despise small tasks like this, so I never really do them until forced.

Having a full time human personal assistant would be best, but this sort of thing is an alright middle ground for me until I make my first billion.

Good point re: the privacy concerns though. Ideally this sort of basic virtual assistant stuff will be on-device at some point.

I really do hope we get to the point of Star Trek style “computer, do task X” and it mostly Just Works. As I get older the less and less I want to futz around with building things computers should just be good at already. AI has already given me new interest in home sensor networks and such since I don’t need to spend so long doing the IT drudge work I’ve done 2 dozen times before in my life and gain no intellectual stimulation from.

"I despise small tasks like this, so I never really do them until forced."

I hope that isn't how you do your job.

For stuff like calendar work, meetings, expense reports, and other busywork? Sure. Hence I have an assistant for that overhead at my job.

Not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand. Who wants to interrupt focus time to tab over to find an open meeting slot coordinated between 4 parties for some low value junk that most meetings are in the corporate world? It’s annoying and even if it only takes a minute or two it means a good 15m or so of lost productivity for me due to context switching. A few of those a day and I’m either working an extra hour to catch up, or down an hour of productivity for the day.

Work output is work. Doing stuff like adding contacts to my phone or scheduling meetings is not work. That’s overhead that should be avoided or automated whenever possible. Having the robots do this for me so I can focus on actual valuable tasks is a net win for me and humanity as a whole. It’s ridiculous this sort of thing hasn’t already been mostly automated out of existence even without AI.

My wife is different sort of brain type. This sort of thing is trivial for her and it’s not a major source of mental overhead for her. Everyone is different.

I mean, it's cool that it's useful for you. I also enjoy when clients find features I implement useful. I just don't like those features being forced onto everyone

We can definitely agree there!

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