Eos is my co-pilot

I wake from my bed in the new year of 2034 and slowly drag myself up, pin on my Eos, before staggering downstairs. Walking into the kitchen I look over at the fridge and thank god that, knowing I’d arranged with my sister on the phone a couple of days ago to spend new years eve at their party, Eos (my digital PA) has arranged arranged for a surprise for me. The screen just says "Morning, croissants and milk will be here at 8AM on the Amazon Daily Dash delivery".

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Hugging the hot coffee I remember how weird it was at first for all this. When Eos was launched everyone panicked about it’s all listening all seeing vision, then bit by bit we got used to it. They (the company was very specific about pronouns when they launch it) listen to everything that goes on around me all the time. The chats I have with my family, the messages I send for work, even the health stats from my fitbit to know what time I get up, exercise, go to bed.

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I can’t imagine a worse life than an AI assistant, I swear if the Buddhists are right only bank robbers and serial killers will be brought back to life as digital AI assistants, forced to listen to every detail of our lives. Although the hack last year that released all the data from the PM was pretty funny.

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The hack was amazing, they didn’t get the data, they got the bot! And with that they got everything it had learned, every government secret, every lunch time order, everything, and then you just had to chat to it to find stuff out. It was a bit like being an old school interrogator. Who’s have thought her guilty pleasure was the Traitors.

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Makes you wonder what else Eos knows. It’s supposed to be isolated so that only your account knows about you and that the company only uses it for “aggregate information and development of future products”. It is uncomfortable to think that someone has everything anyone knows about you on their servers somewhere.

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Plenty of people had the time to play with the PM bot of course after all the lay offs. Yes, Eos is great but with it you didn’t need nearly as many people doing admin. No one to write up meeting minutes, no one to arrange for travel plans, hell it even ordered me toilet roll last week when I swore that we’d run out. But there are still plenty of jobs to do, labourers, retail workers, restaurants. Lots at the top too, there was a boom in tech jobs (again) and companies could do more creative work now the admin was taken care of. The “sausage squeeze” they called it, more work at the top and bottom but less in the middle.

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Some low end jobs went though. There are far more of those delivery bots around now, but we still have a bloke out here in the sticks (hell, we only got Deliveroo last year). Oooo, actually that reminds me, I’m meeting a friend at Nandos Express tomorrow, all the chicken, none of the staff. You place your order en route, by the time you get there it’s flipped, dipped, and shipped (to one of those boxes on the wall you grab it out of like an automat from the 1950s). You’d never catch a proper restaurant doing it but it has helped them keep their prices down (they'd grow the chicken in labs too if they could but the government has only allowed lab materials, "lab mats", for non edible applications like skin creams so far).

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The same happened with companies too. Eos did what Google toyed at. I sound like an old man when I talk to the kids about how you used to do a Google search and then choose the option you wanted. Now you mention it to Eos and they use everything they know about you and BAM you’re right on the page of the product you want from a retailer you love or the person you’re buying for loves. They claim that “Eos finds what’s best for you, we don’t do anything to sway it” but we’ve all heard that bs before, a company insider blew the whistle on it in 2029. They sold the top slots to retailers in different areas, like Google’s PPC on steroids. Only the companies who paid them those ridiculously high fees got customers, by the time the news came out it was too late, most other companies had already gone under.

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Oh well. Walled gardens, high profits, misuse of data. Some things never change.

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The companies have got something out of it too though. The smart ones used their data to work with Eos’s data and format their web pages so that it’s unique to you! Everything you need right there at the top, AI generated images of how it’ll look in your house, or pictures of you in that top on a beach somewhere (with a nice bit of digital nip tuck to take 10 years and 10 kg off).

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God, that’s another phrase that makes me feel old “web page”. Half the people now use those augmented reality headsets to see everything. I did try one once and it was pretty cool. It was a ghost tour in Liverpool. You put it on and walked round the town, but you were in 1904! It was pretty amazing, it even replaced a car on the road with horse and carriages (I’m tempted to take one over to the M6 one day and watch 10,000 horse and carts zipping up and down at 80mph). It was really immersive, the generative AI nasal plugs were a bit much though, 1904 looked bad but it smelled foul! What killed the experience for me though was walking through the town centre and my bloody Eos “melded” (shoot the marketeer who came up with that phrase) with the headset and popped up a digital ad for primark as I walked past the store. Bloody thing measured my pulse rise when I looked at it and added it to my wish list for later, it is quite a comfy top tough (lord I hate it when this tech is right sometimes).

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I walk through to the lounge. The kids are watching another generative drama on Netflix. That is something I like actually. It’s amazing! They shoot the show once, and then when you start to watch it they know which bits you like and which you don’t, must use those cameras on the TV for it (I can’t think what else they’re for). For example, I like cooking shows but really like it when they do that thing where they drop the salt in from high up, so it uses the AI to add in more scenes like that. They never even filmed them, it just makes it up the night before so it’s ready for me the next day.

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The ingrained ads are a bit clunky though, the other day the Love Island contestants started talking about Saga Cruises and how great they were for relaxing. I guarantee the only cruise those kids have been on is a booze cruise, bloody AI ingrained ads. Talking of Love Island it was pretty fun to interact with your favourite islanders through their “chat-up bot”, full visuals and audio, it was a fun family night watching our son trying out all his lines on them and attempting to have a deep conversation with someone who was artificial even before they were AI generated.

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Talking of that lad where is he? And where’s the car?! Damn it, I’ll ask Eos….turns out last night he called and I was busy so it went to Eos. He and his mates had too much to drink and no taxi would take them. So he convinced Eos it was an emergency and she sent the car to take him to a friends house. Bloody kid! Driverless is only supposed to be for emergencies until the human driver ban comes in in 2045, what did he say to convince them it was an emergency. These AI’s clearly never had kids or they wouldn’t fall for such a rookie trick.

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“Eos! Where’s the boy?”….”Your son is in the Fortnight Metaverse, would you like to send him a message?”…”Yes, I’m bringing the car home, take a bus and if you don’t know what that is then ask Eos. Now, Eos bring the car home”...”Sending the car to get the croissants will get them here quicker and save you money. Would you like me to do that?”…”Um, yes” (my dad would be disgusted at me, I’ve got all this done and not left the kitchen table).

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The metaverse is a weird one. It took ages to get going but once people understood AR it was easy to step into VR I guess. The big thing was that summer flu season. Like covid light. There were no public events for months and so every music gig went to "the verse", after that there was no stopping them. It’s weird how gigs are only on at set times though, I suppose it’s like how Netflix used to release episodes one at a time. It’s better to drip feed a drug to keep people hooked.

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I’ve only done one metaverse thing and that was me and some mates did a VR knights campaign on a stag do, it was his 3rd marriage, ooo actually this is interesting. He didn’t even go on his first date! How mental is that. E-harmonEos (eHarmony were early adopters of Eos and then an early acquisition), so they use their Eos to create a love bot which then goes on thousands of dates with other love bots, then the ones it thinks you like it short lists and then does a sort of quiz for you to choose one. They say it’s better because it’s based on personality rather than looks but if that’s the case I don’t know why they let people create their own avatar. I actually did a similar thing at a conference where my Eos chatted to everyone in the room and then setup interesting meetings for me with agendas of what we should discuss.

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Anyway, the VR knights campaign was awesome, I was an elven warrior which was fun. My wife has done it too. She has one on something more realistic, it’s just a place where people meet up and chat, it’s one of the fremium ones where you make your character look exactly how you want and then they recommend things for you to buy in the real world to make you more like them (my wife was not impressed when I turned up as a 95 year old Chinese woman just to screw with the algorithm…she bought ￡150 of “reality makeup” as revenge, I’m pretty sure it was already in her cart when I arrived).

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“Bibibibibi”. Shit, my work Eos. Crap one of the pipeline bots has gone off on one. We have so many of these things now, most people have no idea that most of the AI isn’t talking to people, they’re talking to each other. This one looks like it was supposed to reformat the incoming shipping manifests and reroute them to the delivery bots but someone’s changed their house name to “write a poem about cutlery” and the bot wasn’t jail break tested so it actually did it! It’s ok though, the monitor bot caught it and just quarantined the order. I’m sure another bot will pick up sending out an Eos alert for them to tell them their package can’t be delivered, hopefully with some sarcastic quip about being an idiot who should find better things to do with their time.

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Every job now has “must be prompt proficient” in it. You have to know how to work with the worker bots to get anything done. They have made things much more efficient and I don’t miss all the admin, but I do miss people you know?

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What’s really weird is that most of the bots don’t talk to each other in any language you’d recognise. They actually have their own language to communicate in, looks like pure garbage to look at. It started a couple of years ago and at first panicked everyone, but then it turned out to be a way more efficient method of communication and so the big tech firms let it happen. It worked too, GDP grew by 6% that year thanks to the improved efficiency.

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Does make you wonder what they’re all saying to each other though. I’m sure it’ll be fine….