

Do You Perceive a Need for a Virtual Web Representation of Yourself? - messel
http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/05/24/do-you-perceive-a-need-for-a-virtual-web-representation-of-yourself/

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russell
It's an outline of things a virtual assistant could do for you from the
mundane, looking for interesting articles, to the questionable, posting blog
comments, to being an intelligent avatar. Would I want a research assistant to
scour the web for me? Sure. Would I want one to do my day job, enterprise web
programming? Why not? Would I want it posting comments on HN? What fun would
that be?

~~~
messel
We'd each need to customize our usage highly. Do you think capable (fairly
autonomous) virtual assistants are 50years out, 20 years out, closer?

If it would take hundreds of my hours to train one to do something really
simple it may not work out too well. But if millions of people can
collaboratively train one and somehow share the core upgrades with
personalized variants it'd be pretty mind blowing.

Ideally part of the utility would be like the web "knowing" about 1) what it
contained in real time 2) what you're interests are 3) and letting you know
when "interesting" updates were made. This of course assumes you could keep up
with a fine enough data stream. My interests per time spent are too diverse to
be bleeding edge anything, so I do my best in trying to reach for patterns
across my favorite topics.

