These things would be nightmares for privacy and security. So just a fun daydream… anyway, do folks know of any orgs/labs working on this kind of thing? What forms would you want your daemon to take?

Enter the tiger… “Dad! I’m gonna ride my tiger to Danny’s house!”

Like, they just went out in their neighborhood with their friends. But todays trucks are huge, and people drive while texting, so it really feels like the risk profile of letting your kids walk to their friends house has changed…

Continuing the Amber spyglass thread, I was thinking what kind of form my kid would choose for his “daemon”. It would definitely be a Tiger. Then I thought of how useful that could be for him. Folks in my parents generation bemoan the loss of freedom that kids have in the world today…

If it were squirrel-sized, it could even ride on your shoulder while you walked. I could even see having multiple of these, of different forms, for different situations.

Those bulky batteries and GPUs make wearables awkward and uncomfortable. So, what if your companion wasn’t wearable. What if it was a robot that just followed you around? You could give it the form of some imaginary creature. Something like daemons from the Amber Spyglass…

It seems like, to be really useful, interactive AI companions will need some serious compute and power “on prem”, like in a phone or mobile battery —at least for the near term— so you can have powerful-enough models with low-enough latency. But…

If speech is really a “good enough” bit-rate communication channel for most practical scenarios, then our AI assistants don’t necessarily need to be screens. The Humane pin kind of leveraged that idea. But…