It's a garden hermit. Imagine a future where everyone has one of those(not exactly this version but some future version), it lives with you it learns with you and unlike the cloud based SaaS AI you can teach it things immediately and diverge from the average to your advantage.
In the past, in Europe, some wealthy people used to look after of a scholar living on their premises so they can ask them questions etc.
> Later, suggestions of hermits were replaced with actual hermits – men hired for the sole purpose of inhabiting a small structure and functioning as any other garden ornament.
In the Furiosa context, it's a bit like a medicine man or shaman, then. A private, unreliable source of verbal hand me downs, whose main utility is to make elites feel like they have access to knowledge without needing to acquire it for themselves or question its veracity.
We really are entering a new dark age.
All the indicators are there:
Instead of leaders like Charlemagne who unified the Frankish domain, stabilized society, and promoted education and culture, we now have leaders who want to dismantle society, education and use culture for wars.
Long-distance ocean trade routes since the 1950s have taken international commerce to another level for humans, but this is being challenged now by aging/leaking tankers, unruly piracy at transit choke points, communication cable destruction, etc.
Loss of interest in classical learning and the arts where dystopian, murder or horror movies, music and books now are the best sellers as WW3 seems to be on many people's minds now.
While innovations are still occurring for improved navigation and agricultural productivity, the Earth's ecosystem collapse is in full effect.
I wish it could reversed somehow.
I mean, fair. Very bad hermit-ing.
(Terry Pratchett has a fun parody of this in one of the Discworld books; the garden hermit gets two weeks' holidays a year, which he spends in a large city.)