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?
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.
