> Human personal assistants were connected to the outside world...
There's a difference between the "always on" communication these devices have and communication the user specifically requests.
When I want to make an airline reservation, I'm requesting the device to send the booking information to the airline. I'm not asking it to send a recording to the mothership of everything that happened in my home for the last 5 hours, which a human assistant would never do.
That's also not what's happening with Echo. You'd literally have a few seconds of audio being sent to Amazon and then some text (the result of the ASR) being sent to the third party ticket search / reservation system.
There's a difference between the "always on" communication these devices have and communication the user specifically requests.
When I want to make an airline reservation, I'm requesting the device to send the booking information to the airline. I'm not asking it to send a recording to the mothership of everything that happened in my home for the last 5 hours, which a human assistant would never do.