Google Duplex

At college, after getting demolished in squash against, Mike, a hyper-competitive pre-med, he asked me what I planned to do for a career. I told him I wanted to get into television. He sneeringly countered how he was going to become a surgeon and extend his patients’ lives by many years. The implication being I was wasting my life with something as trivial as TV. “That’s awesome Mike,” I responded enthusiastically, “You know what your patients are going to do with all that extra time on Earth you so generously bestowed them? Watch fucking TV.”

Google Duplex is rightly the talk of the tech town at the moment. It’s pretty amazing.

Sundar Pinchai closed his talk on Duplex with the following (emphasis mine):

“A common theme across all this is we are working hard to give users back time. We’ve always been obsessed about that at Google. Search is obsessed about getting users to answers quickly and giving them what they want.”

We all want more time to do the things we really want to do, but as I watched that video in bed on my phone shortly after I woke up yesterday morning, I couldn’t help but think that all most of us really want to do is the Internet equivalent of watch fucking TV.

The Jerky Boys are going to have a field day with this technology.