My butler is an app

At first we invented things to survive, then we invented things to live better, and now we are inventing things so we do not have to do anything.

In recent years I have seen the emergence of a series of services that a decade ago would have been regarded as luxuries and assumed to be very expensive. Here are a few examples:

• Uber: a chauffeur in a luxury car picks you up and takes you wherever you want, at any time of day.
• Taskrabbit: someone helps you run errands or do chores: deliveries, personal assistance, home repairs, assembling furniture, picking up your clothes from the dry cleaner, et cetera.
• Path Talk (Place Messaging): text messaging businesses to ask questions, make reservations, check product availability and prices, et cetera.
• x.ai: personal assistance for scheduling appointments and meetings.
• Fountain: text, photo, and video chat with home repair and gardening experts to ask questions and get advice.
• Trunk Club: a style expert chooses clothes for you according to your tastes and preferences, sends them to you so you can try them on, return what you do not like, and pay only for what you keep.

Local services have emerged as well, such as Appistear, an app and website in Guadalajara that lets you order alcoholic beverages for delivery to your home. Other services have also appeared in this city that let you call a phone number to have food delivered to your home from whichever restaurant you choose, while another helps you take care of errands.

These kinds of specialized services can be considered alongside platforms such as Google Now and Siri to paint a very clear picture of consumers' current concern: having personal assistants. Having a chauffeur, an assistant, and an expert available at all times. Something that, put that way, would once have been considered exclusively for millionaires and that today, thanks to small technological advances, is becoming a reality.

In fact, it is no longer only about things being available, but about how easy it is to request them. Calling to order a pizza for delivery used to seem very comfortable and convenient, but now it seems like too much work; now we just want to tap a button to order our pizza, as with Push For Pizza (the video on the site explains precisely what I mean).

And this is only the beginning, since it is not far-fetched to think that perhaps within our lifetime we will interact with primitive artificial intelligences or with robots that perform tasks for us.

All of this seems good, it seems positive, but I wonder whether this determination not to lift a finger could have a harmful effect. Could having everything so readily available, so close at hand, and so easy leave us better or worse off than we are now? I do not know, but I think I may get to find out.