> It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)

I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect.

> For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome.

> But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available!

By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it.

That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.

Interestingly, your example is an actual thing we used to have.

In 1996, I picked up the phone on my desk, dialed a 3 digit code, said “I need to fly to Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, returning Wednesday evening”. A couple hours later, an envelope appeared in my inbox with plane tickets, rental car reservation and hotel reservation.

Then every company in the world fired all the secretaries over the course of the next few years to cut costs, and we’ve collectively forgotten that it was ever like that.

I’ll disagree with you a little. The reason I don’t use voice is because of context switching.

With a mouse and keyboard I can switch windows.

With my voice, the computer can’t yet automatically determine if I am dictating a transcription or giving editing commands. What I really need is the interpreter listening to me to intuitively to know whether I am in the equivalent of VI command mode or insert mode.

It is the roadblock to not needing a screen at all, right now I want to visualize whether it understood me correctly because if it didn’t switch from insert to command automatically, I now have all my commands written into my paragraph. I also don’t want to listen to the computer talk back to me to confirm it listened. I want to just keep going, to keep narrating my thoughts and trust it’s doing the right things, not having to check. Having it slowly chime in to repeat that it listened derails my flow and train of thought.

TLDR The future of voice is headless vi.

And this is how you get Moltbook.