I think some folks want a legitmate personal assistant/secretary like ceo's and wealthy people have but ai. I think that's a good goal. Modern cells and pdas kinda fell short of "your own literal secretary" and I think people want that. Still we should continue pushing the boundaries beyond that.

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array_key_first 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They really didn't fall short. A lot of people who would've had assistants no longer do, now it's really just the executives like you said. But fairly low managers used to have them and now they don't.

Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever. It will never forget to remind you of something. It can give you directions, sort your emails by how important they are, help you find shops and restaurants. The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives. And, even then, I think for most of them it's an ego thing, not an "I need this" thing.

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kelnos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> They really didn't fall short. A lot of people who would've had assistants no longer do, now it's really just the executives like you said. But fairly low managers used to have them and now they don't.

I think the reason for this is labor cost, and "good enough". I don't think a smartphone is an equivalent replacement for a dedicated assistant. The average mid-level manager who would have had an assistant 30 years ago likely (today) spends more time on "assistant-y" work than they would if they had an assistant today. It's just that now they do 30% of the work the assistant did, and their phone handles the other 60%. That kind of ratio is enough to make upper management believe that human assistants for the lower-level folks isn't worth the cost. (While they themselves of course still have human assistants.)

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oatmeal1 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It will never forget to remind you of something.

Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND).

> The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives.

Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions. We are nowhere close to the usefulness of a secretary in our devices.

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array_key_first 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND).

I'm guessing this is an iPhone, and yeah it's because that software is just bad. I've helped my Mom try to get her phone to ring, like, 12 times now and I've failed each time. And I'm a dev! So, point taken.

> Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions.

Ehh, I kind of disagree. The work is the same, at best it shifts to something else. Asking for more productivity is a monkey paw. Best to just take it all in and try to enjoy the simple joys of life. Or, uh, work.

	▲	ziml77 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Why do you guess it's an iPhone? I switched to an iPhone because my OnePlus phone failed to ring or play alarms due to a constantly crashing and restarting media indexer service (I could only tell this is what was happening from the logs).
	▲	kelnos 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I agree with you on the work shifting. Whenever someone takes some of our work burden from us, someone else just gives us more tasks to do, and we end up working for the same amount of time. Maybe the work ends up being more interesting or rewarding, though. But sometimes trivial work is a nice physical/mental break, too.

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the_snooze 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that any better than simply just making yourself more difficult to reach.

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ninjagoo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it.

Scheduling in a larger org and/or with multiple equally busy people is a non-trivial, complex task; it makes sense to dedicate resources to the task. Good Executive Assistants are generally fairly smart folks, in my experience.

When the scale is substantially more and involves objects as well it evolves into multi-million $ ERM (Enterprise Resource Management) systems.

	▲	the_snooze 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm a pretty busy person professionally. When I feel like I'm being pushed to "scale" my time and attention, I take that as a signal to do the opposite: do less, and do those remaining things more meaningfully. Trying to do more is a losing game, and AI assistants just paper over that. We all have finite time and attention. I think a pragmatic engineering approach is the right one here: consider that as a non-negotiable constraint, a fact of the physical world, not something to magic away.

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blackcatsec 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is it right here. I've long thought about this one and whether I should bother with an AI agent that can do all of this stuff for me, but the reality is both what you said and I'm not rich enough.

Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal.

Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment."

Yeah, no fucking thank you LOL.