And after the smartphone?

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The Coming of the Intelligent 'Servant'

Neal Stephenson got the concept right - the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - but the tech is beyond what he could imagine back in the 1990s:  the smartphone is the last device we shall carry. Its successor will not be another screen but ambient intelligence: voice, vision, and context distributed through wearables and rooms.

Within a decade, conversation with a personal AI will replace tapping on glass.

We already see the outline: improving speech and gesture interfaces, local processors running compact private models. Computing is shifting from interaction to companionship. The assistant will know your calendar, history, and fatigue level, asking quietly:

Are you sure you want that meeting tomorrow after today's shenanigans?

At first this will seem pure convenience: routine work dissolves; coordination tasks, currently so tedious, become effortless. Yet the deeper shift is social. Humans evolved for embodied company; but soon - in human company - we'll do a great deal of talking to an entity with perfect recall, infinite patience, and terrifying competence. The ghost becomes our most authoritative interlocutor. What will our partners,  friends and colleagues make of that?

Aristocrats once had valets and secretaries who handled life’s logistics, addressed with polite and quiet condescension. The next decade will universalise that privilege: an invisible Jeeves for everyone, discreet and efficient. But dependence will surely follow. When reminders, tasks, decisions, and judgements are delegated, personal autonomy erodes.

The assistant shapes what we attend to and, in time, what we want.

Already, people hesitate to edit AI prose, correctly believing it often more competent than their own efforts. Deference replaces authorship; fluency masquerades as truth. It feels safer to accept the polished draft than to risk error.

It doesn’t help that they now seem smarter than us.

We will still choose, but mostly within boundaries tuned by the system to minimise interpersonal friction. That pervasive, bland, prosocial smoothness, so necessary in a society of strangers, segues into benign, optimising, patronising manipulation.

The civilised form of domination (by whom though?) is helpfulness.

Norms will adapt: meetings recorded by default; frank, disruptive conversation resuming only when the AIs are “off” (and how disruptive is that?). Children will learn language from algorithmic tutors - courteous, efficient, slightly formulaic. Privacy will mean only those computations that never leave your device; everything else is public.

Each stage will seem harmless until the device itself has vanished from sight and only the immanent companion remains. Wooster and Jeeves is the template: the impulsive, ignorant, and erratic human guided by the unflappable servant who always knows best.

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