Enter the Matrix

Thursday 17 December 2020 - Filed under Default

Siri, smart speakers, and voice-based personal assistants are approaching ubiquity and yet, I’m unimpressed. I’d rather tap for weather than ask out loud and I like to keep megacorporations at arms-length but a couple weeks ago, I imagined what my ideal AI assistant would look like and how it could help.

Focused on the beginning of the day, I started coding in Python. Now you could ask yourself, what do you forget? Or what habit do you want to develop for which you could use some reminders? That’s pretty much what I put in.

What I learned from this exercise is that it’s very useful for building habits, a prompt reminded me to make this kind of post, but this also feels more user-friendly than a digital assistant that must be spoken to. There’s MyCroft for building your own, but that’s a project and again, talking? Out loud? Plus it’s more fun to hack Python than setup Raspberry Pis.

I’m in the honeymoon period with my little script, and time management strategies tend to lose their lustre over some weeks, but I’ll be interested to see how if it sticks and how it can grow in utility.

Honestly, this feels like the beginnings of merging with The Matrix. Elon Musk recently said humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in an AI age. I don’t need a robot arm or superhuman vision, but I’ve learned a little help on the daily is actually pretty nice.

2020-12-17  »  David Sterry