Comment by signatoremo
3 days ago
That's because you just lack of imagination. Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do? Examples:
"Find me the cheapest ticket to Las Vegas for the first week of June. Buy one at anytime that you think is reasonable. Wait until no later than two months from now before buying. Get two tickets if my brother can also go".
"Email me if anyone posts a Sega multi mega for sale. But only if it's in black color".
I have no idea if OpenClaws can already do such a task or not, I don't have one, but it opens up new possibilities. If it isn't there yet, it will be.
> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?
That’s kind of the confusing thing for me, I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line. I couldn’t teach them my preferences well enough to trust them to do it the way I want, instead of just doing it myself.
Personal assistants only make sense to me if you’re so rich that money doesn’t really matter to you anyways.
Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites.
> I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line.
You don’t have to trust them with money. You can ask them to send you the info for you to do the final step.
> Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
Maybe not you, but people already use personal travel agency for their booking need, see for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/travelagents/comments/1i4fiod/best_...
Air ticket booking agency used to be popular before the Internet made that business obsolete.
> The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites
Sega multi mega is a rare collectible item. No price tracking websites have it. You need to frequent online groups or forums of enthusiasts. eBay may have ones, but information (e.g color) may be missing, and follow-up is required. OpenClaw can do that for you.
Yes, there are probably people for whom this sort of thing can work.
For example, when I was at M$, management came to us extolling the virtues of Cortana and the then new "smart inbox". The manager was ecstatic. And for him, it maybe really was the neatest thing since sliced bread. And I know plenty of people with 10000+ unread in their INBOX. For them, it might be lifesaver.
But all the engineers in the room were "eek, get it away from me and make sure it never gets near my inbox". I personally maintain an INBOX-0 policy, not always perfectly, but it works for me. Unreads never last for more than a few minutes. So I have "situational awareness" of my e-mail, and when Apple also introduced smart inboxes, they broke that situational awareness while adding nothing whatsoever to my benefit. And people I communicate with also started losing e-mails, because they got sorted somewhere they weren't expecting.
So turn that shit off.
Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly: none of these scenarios you give as examples are things that resonate with me at all, and I wouldn't delegate them to a human personal assistant either.
I mean, yes, some people have real issues with delegating tasks to others. Those people probably wouldn't get much benefit from an... AI assistant. That doesn't "illustrate your point", it just states the obvious.
You are confusing "issues" with "lack of need" and "lack of benefit of proposed solution".
Again, I think the tech is cool, and I would actually really like to both better understand and try out the tech. But to try something out in earnest, I need some concrete use-case, and so far the use-cases I have seen range from "meh" to "get it away from me".
For agentic coding, I also needed some concrete use cases, and I found where it worked really well, where it struggles, and where it's just horrible.
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> Imagine if you have a human personal assistant, what would you ask them to do?
Those are not good examples for why people have a human assistant, you have human assistants to do in-person or person-to-person things that you don't have the time or desire to do yourself. They are simply not the same as releasing a 24/7 ai roulette process on the internet with all your payment and account info.
The online monitoring examples can be done with current automation tools and scripts
If I had a human personal assistant, I'd tell him to clean my gutters, sweep the driveway, clean the kitchen table...
I understand, if we imagine a world where everyone is constantly plugged into the computer all the time, and every bit of human activity is coordinated and surveilled by the computer at all times, this shit appears to be quite useful. Otherwise and even if, it's total schlock.
Like, "hey openclaw can you order me groceries" is great, but the only reason is that there's a wageslave on the other side of that transaction who has to drive to the grocery storef and pick the groceries out. Pretty soon that slave is going to be all of us and my god it makes me feel like an insane person that the boosters of this tech don't see that.
Good luck ever getting this to work when airlines still refuse to publish APIs and captcha anything that looks automated.
Well, it will work when there is enough demand. “Ever” is very long time. Are you willing to bet on it?
The point still, is that OpenClaw opens new exciting (and dangerous) opportunities for non technical users.