One of those mindless consumers here, guilty as charged.
I do have a pre-order for the Rabbit, but I doubt I will see it until July given how quickly they backlog on pre-orders. I believe that Disney currently owns the rights to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, and if they were to make an AI assistant modeled after the guide, they would make a killing.
I currently play around with various open-source AI projects and run open LLM models locally. I have gotten practical use from them on automating tasks in minutes that used to take me half an hour to an hour.
From a coding standpoint, I have used them to create Dockerfiles, PowerShell scripts, Code Generators, and validators and automate Web-scraping tasks. I've used it to summarize code commits based on changes, generate XML code comments for methods, and add code to handle exception conditions. I can give it a code snippet to describe what it is doing, translate between Microsoft, Oracle, and MySQL query syntax, and perform some language localization tasks (with verification, of course). I am also looking to use AI to automate code reviews and ensure that best practices are being followed without requiring the time of other developers.
It may seem like laziness or cheating, but in all honesty, it does take good prompting to get good results. I love it because it saves time. To me, ladies and gentlemen, time is a valuable commodity.
I look forward to a digital assistant that can monitor my finances, automate vacation planning, remind me about upcoming events and appointments, and be a general resource to research on the fly. I want to be able to take a picture of an insect or plant and let me know if it's dangerous or possibly edible.
I want to pay less mind to mundane tasks and be more mindful of those I find new, enjoyable, and rewarding. I'll suffer being a mindless consumer as long as I can be a mindful developer.