I believe that in the fullness of time we will see that by the mid/late-2020s our society was completely information-saturated/overloaded, and hence why turning to these personal AI agents was seen by most as an easy decision (if not downright necessary to gain a feeling of control again over their lives).
Most peers (Millennial knowledge workers) I talk to these days constantly discuss the feeling of "being overwhelmed", and I suspect a lot of it is just the info-sphere.
Neil Postman predicted some of this many decades ago in "Informing Ourselves to Death", where he argued that increasing the speed, volume, and accessibility of information would not necessarily improve society (i.e. information without context/judgment and institutional scaffolding can become socially destructive).
I really feel like we live in that world, and hence the rise of these AI agents as a potential "solution" to that.
Most peers (Millennial knowledge workers) I talk to these days constantly discuss the feeling of "being overwhelmed", and I suspect a lot of it is just the info-sphere.
Neil Postman predicted some of this many decades ago in "Informing Ourselves to Death", where he argued that increasing the speed, volume, and accessibility of information would not necessarily improve society (i.e. information without context/judgment and institutional scaffolding can become socially destructive).
I really feel like we live in that world, and hence the rise of these AI agents as a potential "solution" to that.