Return of slavery?

Technology has certainly changed many peoples lives, whether this is for the good or bad of humanity, but along with this brought a whole new level of intelligence.  Although this story relates to the ability of humans working algorithms, I am more referring to the level of autonomous systems or applications available, at the touch of a few key strokes.

Over the last few decades, only the educated scientist and geek could program his computer device to do things for him, this has radically changed over the last few years to the extent that we rely on computers and have no idea how to do things for ourselves.  You can think back to simple things like passwords, years ago you had to remember your password otherwise you would be in trouble with your IT department, now you can choose "remember your password" on your browser.

Moving this level of intelligence forward there are tools available now to help you automate tasks, that can save you time and stop you from boring repetitive tasks, after all computers were invented to help humans.  I draw your attention to ifttt.com, a truly useful and unique site that allows you to perform so many different tasks its unbelievable.  You can automatically get it to email you, text you, search for you, grad RSS feeds, grab news, upload, download to many of the popular tools and social media sites you use.  This may sound good, but think of the practicalities, if someone updates a web page it will trigger to send an email to you, wow, this saves time.  How about downloading photo's from facebook when you get tagged, imagine how much time that costs you, looking through feeds!  How about emailing or texting you today's weather forecast?  Really the only limits are the sites they can work with and your imagination.

Then suddenly I read today about a similar service but this one is an (beta) app for Android (iOS in development) that uses trigger in the same way iftt.com does, so this could perform tasks for you on your phone while you drive or walk around or go for a jog.  The product is called Atooma and looks nice and simple to use.  All you have to do is think of what actions a phone can perform, text, telephone, record, speak and of course has built in GPS if enabled, so you only have to imagine how location could be used with events.

Taking an overall look at these facilities you can look forward to many more services to make your life easier, soon you may not need to do anything for yourself.  With autonomous systems advancing maybe they will run your life, remind you to occasionally think, do your work for you, tell you the best response to immortal human questions.  Hell, maybe they will learn enough to communicate with each other, so we no longer have to go out and work for our salary?  So who will be the slave, us or machine?...............  Times are changing, technology advancements will change history, excited?