---
title: "Assistants"
date: "2026-10-19"
description: "personalised ai assistants in science fiction and real life"
draft: false
---

I spent some time today reading [Aura Overload](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/149866/aura-overload), a science fiction space opera. An AI assistant called Evangeline accompanies Hector, the main character. Evangeline is a personalised assistant who is capable of mind reading Hector, communicates telepathically, and navigate the wider internet as an autonomous agent. Hector's cybernetic enhancements house Evangeline, making Evangeline's continued survival dependent on Hectors. What is more is that Hector himself is a 'Ghost'. Cybernetics back up the memories of Ghosts. This allows the cybernetics to resurrect Hector and Evangeline in a new body.

Now this science fiction is considerably far away at this point. We have only scratched the surface of cybernetics, and installed media in humans: synthetic organs and augmentations.

What I found interesting in Aura Overload, was the idea of a personal assistant. It sounds and feels like there are a sheer infinite number of AI tools that are vying for this niche. But I truly wonder what this will look like once open source and integrate AI chips lead this. Once onboard AI-capable hardware becomes common, data sovereignty will follow. I wonder them what the form of AI assistants will take. We have seen in recent times harness for coding, but it feels less straightforward what an `assistant` harness will look like. We have all these interesting demos from Google and Apple with what their voice assistants can do, but what will happen once these companies no longer gain the recordings of personal conversations of users?