Do we all want to be middle-managers for AI assistants?

So we’ve entered the era of personal AI agents as assistants. The most famous one being, of course, Meta’s new assistant Muse. What’s the obsession with personal assistants? Is this a generational thing? In my dad’s generation, having a secretary was a marker that you had made it. You were important enough for someone else to take drudge work off your hands, to guard your time against intrusions. It was a status marker as much as it was a means to increase efficiency. I feel like I came up on the idea that everything was dis-intermediated by the internet: I could do everything myself, bypassing the many proverbial middlemen that existed before: Travel agents, ticket agencies, newspaper stands? Pah! We could just get it all ourselves.(How much I now yearn for a good travel agent…) So I wonder who these agents are for? I mean, besides the fact that they’ll most likely ruin the internet, because if they get adopted at scale, then web services will have to cater to them, and they’ll…