Quiet, My Exoself

Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself. While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated. This entity is clearly not our self. But at the same…