Tech Paradoxes
The history of consumer technology innovations has been about making technology more and more a part of our lives.
The PC, the internet, mobile, wearables and so on, made technology intricately interwoven into daily life. Everything came towards us. But we remained the ultimate operator of the technology. For it to "do the thing" it promised, it was us that did the doing. It did more for us, but it took more from us.
The promise of AI is that it becomes even more integrated into everything we do: "always on" in the background, ambiently listening to and seeing everything we do, in order to take action on our behalf. Take it a step further into the world of "embodied AI" (the recent rebrand of robotics) and it becomes even more pervasive than that.
Putting aside whether it's all unrealistic science fiction, it implies is a paradox where technology becomes yet more present but our interaction with it, as the operator, gets less intense. Technology itself might solve our over-exposure to technology on a day-to-day basis. Instead, it recedes into the background, like another layer of the environment on top of the natural world.
I'm not sure whether that's utopia or dystopia, but it's certainly different. And a bit ironic...