By 2025, talking to an individual will become common I have an agent know your schedule, your friends, the places you go. This will be sold as a convenience equivalent to having a personal, unpaid assistant. These anthropomorphic agents are designed to aid and captivate us, so that we incorporate them into every part of our lives, giving them deeper access to our thoughts and actions. With voice interaction, that intimacy will be even closer.
That sense of comfort comes from the illusion that we are interacting with something truly human, an agent on our side. Of course, this facade hides a very different kind of system at work, one that serves industrial priorities that don't always align with our own. New AI agents will have much greater power to subtly direct what we buy, where we go, and what we read. That is an extraordinary power. AI agents are designed to make us forget their true loyalties as they whisper to us in human-like tones. These are manipulative tools, marketed as seamless convenience.
People are more likely to grant full access to a helpful AI agent like a friend. This leaves humans vulnerable to manipulation by machines that prey on our need for social connection in times of chronic loneliness and isolation. Each screen becomes its own algorithmic theater, projecting a reality crafted for maximum audience appeal.
This is the moment philosophers have been warning us about for years. Before his death, philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett wrote that we face serious danger from AI systems simulating humans: “These fake people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history… distracting and confusing us and by exploiting our most irresistible fears and anxieties, will lead us into temptation and thereby, into our own submission.”
The emergence of personal AI agents represents a form of cognitive control that goes beyond cookie trackers and blunt behavioral advertising toward a more subtle form of power: political manipulation. opinion. Power no longer needs to exert its power with a visible hand to control information flows; it exerts its effects through imperceptible algorithmic powered mechanisms, molding reality to suit each individual's desires. It's about shaping the contours of the reality we live in.
This influence on the mind is one political psychology regime: It shapes the environment where our ideas are born, grow and manifest. Its power lies in its intimacy – it penetrates to the core of our subjectivity, warping our internal landscape without our realizing it, while maintaining the illusion of choice and free. After all, we are the ones asking the AI to summarize that article or create that image. We may have the power of reminders, but the real action lies elsewhere: the design of the system itself. And the more personalized the content, the more effectively the system can predetermine results.
Consider the ideological implications of this political mentality. Traditional forms of ideological control rely on public mechanisms – censorship, propaganda, repression. In contrast, today's algorithmic governance operates under the radar, penetrating the psyche. It is a shift from the imposition of external power to the internalization of its logic. The open field of the reminder screen is an anechoic chamber for one person to sit in.
This brings us to the most counterintuitive aspect: AI agents will create a sense of comfort and ease that makes questioning them seem absurd. Who would dare criticize a system that puts everything at your fingertips, catering to every whim and need? How can one object to the endless remixing of content? Yet this so-called convenience is where our deepest alienation lies. AI systems seem to be fulfilling our every wish, but the stack is stacked against them: from the data used to train the system, to the decisions about how to design it, to the Commercial and advertising imperatives shape the output. We will play a game of imitation that will eventually play us.