(2018-10-10) Hon S06e09 Whats The Target

Dan Hon s06e09: What’s the target?

1.2 What If Agents, But With More A.I. This Time

Essential Products (Andy Rubin’s thing after running Android at Google) are developing a new phone that “will try to mimic the user and automatically respond to messages on their behalf

“If I can get to the point where your phone is a virtual version of you, you can be off enjoying your life, having that dinner, without touching your phone, and you can trust your phone to do things on your behalf,”

what Rubin is pitching (at a high level, at least) is what General Magic was pitching in the 1990s and the kind of thing that, unsurprisingly, Douglas Adams got really excited about

My understanding of how Magic would’ve worked was that it didn’t rely on mining a crap-ton of personal data, it relied on you telling it what you wanted to do. The potential difference with what’s being pitched right now and the difference in implementation is that mimicking the user requires the sort of large-scale data collection that we’re rightly suspicious of these days.

Anyway. A vision of an intelligent agent that works on your behalf to do what you ask it to do and spends your money in ways that you approve (oh how in any possible way could anyone have a problem with this) is much more difficult to work with (maybe?) when you don’t pay with money, you pay with Attention.

1.3 Mr. Ocean, the purpose of this meeting is to determi

*Here’s a throwaway thought:

A legacy technology modernization and replacement project portrayed as an Ocean’s 11-style heist movie.*

What? You wanna knock over a VA core data center? Danny puts down his coffee. And shakes his head. And lifts three fingers. Then a pause. Five fingers. Thirty five data centers.

Also, this is me belatedly realising that heist movies are like competence porn! The drama isn’t in wondering whether they’ll get away with it (they should get away with it), the drama is in seeing how they get away with it, which in a way is like all the behind-the-scenes Aaron Sorkin Sports Night, West Wing stuff: here’s this big thing we’ve got to pull off and all these people are involved and it’s all got to go just right. How fun!