A year ago I wrote about the virtual assistant products that had found their way into my life. Since the category was VERY hyped up in 2015, and seemed to cool a bit this year (from an adoption/investment perspective), here’s how my usage trends have changed over the 365 days.

Fancy Hands: STILL my go-to task-based assistant. I don’t use FH for meeting scheduling but instead rely upon them for a variety of requests. Recent ones include:

• Submitting information to my insurance company around policy changes
• Arranging car service when I’m traveling (and Uber isn’t the best solution for some reason)
• A list of SF Holiday ballet and dance performances appropriate for kids to attend
• Martial arts classes in SF that fathers and daughters can attend together
• List of private chefs who specialize in preparing meals for recovering cancer patients (for a friend)

Facebook Messenger’s M: Held steady but narrowed. M isn’t currently suited for complex tasks where research or judgment impacts quality. M also won’t touch anything it deems medical related, so no scheduling doctor appointments or even checking if a prescription is ready for pickup from the pharmacy. That said, I use M to schedule hair cuts, restaurant reservations and similar requests where a call and information submission or retrieval is needed. I often queue these up pre-normal business hours and then M will address once these businesses are open.

Wonder: I use Wonder for b2b’ish research but they’re really good for any type of research question where you could imagine a subject expert needing 15-30 minutes to pull you together an answer. Quality can really vary but they’ll redo a project if you find the results insufficient. Use this URL to get yourself $15 off a task: https://askwonder.com/r/hunterwalk

GetService: Solves customer service issues for you. I don’t have these often but when I do, I turn to Service first. They just resolved a disputed hotel charge for me from my minibar with very little effort on my part. Still a free service.

What am I missing? Are there awesome virtual assistant services you use?

I guess Westworld has made this a hot topic, but even better (or at least shorter) is this article “If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots?”

It turns out that, for a host of reasons the author covers, we feel moral regret when we cause or observe pain, even if the recipient can’t feel that pain, such as a robot.

At one point, a roboticist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory built an unlovable, centipede-like robot designed to clear land mines by crawling forward until all its legs were blown off. During a test run, in Arizona, an Army colonel ordered the exercise stopped, because, according to the Washington Post, he found the violence to the robot “inhumane.”

Or consider this experiment involving the Pleo, a “lifelike” robot dinosaur.

In an experiment that Darling and her colleagues ran, participants were given Pleos—small baby Camarasaurus robots—and were instructed to interact with them. Then they were told to tie up the Pleos and beat them to death. Some refused. Some shielded the Pleos from the blows of others. One woman removed her robot’s battery to “spare it the pain.” In the end, the participants were persuaded to “sacrifice” one whimpering Pleo, sparing the others from their fate.

Of course the ultimate issue isn’t that we fear the robots are going to become sentient and revolt but rather “The problem with torturing a robot, in other words, has nothing to do with what a robot is, and everything to do with what we fear most in ourselves.”