There are good, honest use-cases for this technology though: for example a food ordering platform that needs to gather holiday openings hours for hundreds of thousands og restaurants globally. These restaurants are not tech-savvy: so the only alternative is using people to call them.
I don't disagree. I'm not condemning the whole product right now. I have only two primary worries:
1/ Huge increase in amount of robocall spam.
2/ Given the discussion on the Duplex HN thread, I'm starting to seriously worry people will try and do machine-to-machine communication through Duplex, which is something completely idiotic and wasteful, but might also become easier than doing the right thing (agreeing on an API).
99% of the time? Where did you get that?
GPS is better than human only wherever it has better data. Bring it to a place where it has no data and its useless. Meanwhile, humans can easily adopt to find themselves in places they've never been before.
I think most examples of machines telling people what to do still happen in context of paid work, and even there, quite often there's a good reason for that.
Personally, my worry with Duplex is all the abuse - er, growth hacking - that will happen.