Bill Gates teases top-secret 'Personal Agent' project he's working on with Microsoft

[Shawn Knight]

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently hosted his third Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. Among the mix of serious and semi-serious questions, Gates provided some details about an unknown project that he is currently working on with Microsoft called Personal Agent.

Gates said the Personal Agent will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to. The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new, he noted, is just not an efficient model. The Agent will help solve this and it’ll work across all devices.

The admission came in response to a question about the future of technology. Specifically, what he thinks the next 30 years hold in terms of technology.

The answer to that question, if you’re wondering, is that there will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever before. Even in the next 10 years, we will have mastered problems like vision and speech understanding and translation. Once computers / robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them, he added, they will be used extensively.

Some speculated that the Agent is Cortana but that seems unlikely considering it has already been announced and is called Cortana, not Personal Agent. Perhaps maybe it’s an add-on to Cortana?

Personal Agent sounds like some sort of software aggregator that's able to communicate with all of your apps and pull relevant data from each one instead of you manually having to open each app to access the data. Any guesses?

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https://www.techspot.com/news/59556-bill-gates-teases-top-secret-personal-agent-project.html

 

[stewi0001]

It must be nice to be so loaded that you don't have to worry about money and to be able to focus on things that you think are important

 

[Guest]

Oh God! they're updating that f'ing paperclip! he's broken out of word and will take over everything, and still teach you how to tie a noose...

 

[SalaSSin]

@Guest: That was my first idea too

Or Rover... Does anyone remember Rover, the little dog introduced with MS Bob, if I'm not mistaken.

Bill, get us a HoloLens Rover please!

 

[dobermanmacleod]

First, I doubt many people, including Bill Gates, understands how rapid AI is advancing. I would be willing to bet on it. Neural net software technology (with "tweeks"), quantum computer Rose's law, and unprecedented data bases to educate the neural nets, means the Singularity (the time when artificial super intelligence emerges) will happen much sooner than was predicted. Of course, few understand what that means.

Second, there is emerging a divide between people who embrace privacy, and those who are willing embrace transparency instead so as to gain the benefits of technology such as this proprietary "personal assistant" (I.e. AI) technology, which will know all about you, and will share it, and will be owned by (in this instance) Microsoft.

Third, a question that I consider much less sinister than you might: what happens when software gains visual and audio "intelligence," plus is ubiquitous (I.e. is everywhere, seeing and hearing everything)? Can you live without your personal assistant? Can you live without your smartphone? How about your car which will shortly drive itself (you don't believe me do you). I personally consider it paradise, but many of you hold the old paradigm, and consider it an abomination.

The Singularity is coming.

 

[Guest]

We dont trust the singularity because the closer we come to technology the more governments and the corporations abuse it. Perhaps the singularity could be more easily embraced if it wasn't expected to be abused and corrupted. Until then, it might as well be an abomination. There's no reason to consider it anything else until we can trust it.

It would be foolish to embrace something you have every reason not to trust rather than to trust.

 

[Guest]

Yes it is.

Bill