Over the ensuing months, that amicable consensus devolved into a long-standing tug-of-war between Hart and his engineers, who saw playing music as a practical and marketable feature, and Bezos, who was thinking more grandly. Bezos started to talk about the “Star Trek computer,” an artificial intelligence that could handle any question and serve as a personal assistant. The fifty-cent word “plenipotentiary” was used inside the team to describe what he wanted: an assistant invested with full powers to take action on behalf of users, like call for a cab or place a grocery order. With his science
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