> It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us.

With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters. The idea is that if Clippy was bad, what's happening now is way worse. Clippy is a significant improvement over the modern setting.

> With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters.

This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.

The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.

The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.

I think the argument is that clippy would totally have done that if it was an option back then.