I'm not sure we're actually that far off technically from getting the _kind_ of automation that Star Trek computer can do, we're just trying to get our voice as

I'm not sure we're actually that far off technically from getting the _kind_ of automation that Star Trek computer can do, we're just trying to get our voice assistants to do a ton of other crap that the Star Trek computer doesn't have to worry about on the business level. Star Trek computer has no idea about advertisements/search optimization, etc, it's more like a helpful shell/magic talking box in most cases. If the Star Trek doesn't understand the request or can't complete it as requested, it prompts the user for more details or parameters and lets you know what you didn't give it. Similarly, the way we see interactions with the computer in TNG is that you define a task for the computer and the computer further defines business rules until it can start a workflow. It's not trying to push you towards a specific source of information or a specific outcome, it's just trying to define the rules to take your input and get the desired output. AI-based control systems like this need to be established like we'd have a library or framework or protocol first, something that is just built for accomplishing tasks and refining that to a point that it is a workhorse. When it comes to subjective matters, it needs to not try to build a profile on what you want and predict it, it needs to be painfully obtuse in its objectivity. Even on Star Trek, the computer struggled with matters of personal taste/entertainment even though it could ingest complex technical requirements and write equally or more complex workflows/code on the fly for specific tasks. It was pretty often with things like the holodeck or even just playing music/games to pass the time the computer didn't understand what the requestor meant and even though it produced an output, the output had to be refined a lot in fairly specific terms. Even something like shopping was still pretty manual, just piecing through a catalog of items to replicate was seen many times. The point is that the Star Trek computer was optimized for specific workloads and shined there, and stayed out of the way for absolutely everything else. I'm don't have hope that modern tech companies have the discipline to design something like this. AI and smart homes I think lack a lot of focus and polish, trying to be way too much at once and also return further revenue for the businesses with ad-tech; I don't have any hope that modern tech companies are going to be the smart-home revolution as much as FOSS will, but that of course has the chicken and egg problem of finding hardware that will actually work with FOSS smart-homes; I'll gladly side with Stallman on this one and position that if the entire stack was truly free, then we would see innovation and closer to Star Trek style smart homes since you could buy any smart-object and just run free software on it that meets your needs. But I don't have hope that any tech company has a desire or interest in this, and personally I cannot get invested in anything from the major tech companies as it's just going to be obsolete in a few years and the services will stop working; Google has demonstrated this with far too many projects, and even Apple struggles to get its smart-object integrations to stick (I think one of the major car manufacturers dropped CarPlay for their new vehicles going forward?) It's hard for me to be excited or interested in smart-anything as I don't have the confidence I can rely on it for more than a year or two.