&gt; Until we have algorithms that create algorithms, software rewriting itself and evolving based on higher goals, we won&#x27;t see the promised star-trek-level personal assistants come to fruition.<p>There&#x27;s a massive jump you&#x27;re making here, I feel. From where we are to &quot;computer, invent a new novel for me&quot; there&#x27;s a huge range of useful mid-points.<p>One level is just understanding more about human-written unstructured data to answer questions.<p>Another is to be better at sending commands to <i>other</i> humans.<p>Third there&#x27;s linking these things up. Understanding where there are gaps in the knowledge, who might be able to fill them in and then asking them the right questions. I know there was work done in this area as part of CoSY back in 2004-2008 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.bham.ac.uk&#x2F;research&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cosy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.bham.ac.uk&#x2F;research&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cosy&#x2F;</a>  which was followed with <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.bham.ac.uk&#x2F;research&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cogx&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.bham.ac.uk&#x2F;research&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cogx&#x2F;</a><p>This then gets you to the level of essentially free personal assistants for a wide range of general tasks. That would be valuable to a very large number of people.