> Your giving up lot of personal information and potential freedom of choice to have "AI" (not sure that's the right word for it anyway), do a bunch of these tasks just for, what you perceive as convenience.

Come on now, you can't handwave away what to me are very real benefits as "perceived convenience", and just because it seems like a lot of personal information to you doesn't mean it is for me.

Yes, i'm letting them see a lot of personal information, but that's not a bad thing. I get tangible benefits from it (not just this "AI", but many many other services), and I'm actually asking for more. Right now it only learns my music preferences from when i play stuff with Google Music, i'd love to feed my soundcloud history into it to give me a more well-rounded set of preferences. I'd also like to feed my netflix watch history into it to let them give me better tv/movie recommendations. This isn't a "mistake" by me, this is a conscious decision I am making to improve my life by giving them more information, just like how it's not a "mistake" that someone pays money for a service they want/need (even if you personally don't want or need that service).

Also, i'm not so sure that "AI" is the right thing to call it either, but it's the term that was chosen, so it's what i'll call it. I read somewhere once that "AI" stops being "AI" when we understand it, and just starts being "programming" at that point, and it makes a lot of sense. As we get better at making programs that feel "natural", it's less "magical AI that can do anything" and more "well understood programming techniques".

>For example, having content fed to you is potentially unhealthy, "Google, read me today news", are you telling me you just want to be fed any kind of information based on some kind of "preferences"?

Come on now, are we going to have an actual discussion here or are you just going to build up strawmen to kick down? First off, it's not my only source of news. I'm not having them "feed" me anything. Second, it's more of reading headlines that i might be interested in. For example, this morning it showed me 5 headlines:

* A new XKCD comic is out
* "The Macbook pro 2016 October release date confirmed" from the University Herald
* A story from TechCrunch saying that the Boeing CEO says he's gonna beat SpaceX at something
* An article from PCWorld titled "Happy 25th once again to Linux"
* And (funnily enough) this story from TechCrunch titled "Not OK, Google"

I'm not being "brainwashed" here, i'm not letting google determine what i'm interested in, i'm not taking anything there blindly at face value, it's just a list of headlines that I can either click to view the article, or lookup at my own will (or in many cases lookup on HN or Reddit for some discussion about it). Every one of those i'm interested in in some fashion. I personally find it funny that you think it's unhealthy to have an "AI" "feed" you information, while most traditional news networks are much more of a "feed", but they don't tailor to any kind of personal preferences (what fox news decides to air, is what fox news watchers are going to watch). That to me is much more dangerous! At least in this case I can tell the system that I don't like this story (because it's blogspam, or it's incorrect, or it's just done in bad taste), and to not show me stories like this again.

>As you said it's a choice but don't pretend people totally know what's being done with the data.

No, and I don't pretend to know what is being done with the data, that's the point. I give them that data, and they do what they want with it, and in return I get all of the benefits I get. There's nothing stopping them from selling it, there's nothing stopping them from releasing it to the public, there's nothing stopping them from looking through it personally to find "bad" things. But I have "faith" (if you can call it that) that they won't. Because if they do, i'm done with them. And a lot more people would be as well.

>I hope there is age limit restrictions placed on this kind of thing.

There is, as with most things online it's "under 13 needs adult supervision". Funnily enough I've read that toddlers LOVE these things. It's much easier for a child to tell the TV to play Thomas the Tank Engine than it is for them to fumble around with a remote, or have access to a phone. It's actually becoming a really good way to let little kids be involved in computers and technology at a younger age, which I believe will be a major benefit in their lives (the jury is still out on that though).