Someday soon, software will learn your habits and be able to look out for you

If you think chatbots are hot right now -- with how they're being used in psychotherapy, turning into racist trolls, and presenting an existential threat to Apple -- just wait until they turn into full-fledged personal assistants. In five years time, digital personal assistants will even more important than your smartphone, says University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos, author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World." "What you have right now on your smartphone is dozens of apps," Domingos tells Tech Insider, "with each app doing it's own thing." On any given Friday night, you use one app to find a restaurant, another to buy a movie ticket, another to figure out how to get to where you're going, and another to find a date to take out with you. "It's incredibly annoying," he says, since the apps "don't talk to each other and you have to learn all these different interfaces."