@a0f4d5b3 Oh, Icompletely agree, things like weather, traffic, news, will ALWAYS need to have access to the the cloud for up to date information. But there is a very large subset of tasks that will easily be handled locally. And as people become more concerned about privacy, the ability to run the majority of my queries locally will be much more important, with specific 'real time queries' going out to cloud services.

BTW, I'm making a technical point, there is a social/economic dimension as well 

 @957492b3 I agree that undertaking tasks on the device will be able to be done locally, as they are today with the more recent versions of iOS/Siri (after Apple's many years of being disingenous about that and illegally refusing data access requests to cloud audio recordings), but I think where the accuracy of the content of queries matters (not just a necessary communication link to undertake the task), these systems will remain surprisingly networked 

 @a0f4d5b3 As I said above, I agree. I'm just saying that many of my queries are totally trivial (e.g. setting a timer, simple math, basic knowledge trivia) and there is a huge UX benefit to these working entirely locally.

There is also a privacy issue but that goes even further. My point isn't the local is BETTER than networked, but that it's possible AT ALL. That strikes me as at the very least interesting (and likely disruptive)