The Technium: Quiet, My Exoself
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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 time, this always-on AI will be so close to us, understanding us so well and so deeply — better than almost any human could — that it will not be an other, or an outsider either. It can model us too well to be an other. It will be an exoself: something in between our self and an other self. Neither us, but also not outside of us. A new category.
It won’t feel strange, because we don’t feel strange wearing eyeglasses all day, or hearing aids, or carrying a computer in our pockets. Machines like this have been moving closer to us since they were invented. Smart machines started out as room-sized apparatus, then moved nearer as appliances alongside a desk, then onto the desktop in front of us, then onto our laps, then into our pockets — and soon, they will sit on our skin, perhaps on our heads. We already see prototypes of smart glasses, where the exoself can perch, whispering into our ears and illuminating our eyes.
A borrowed term
The term “exoself” is borrowed from science fiction. Authors Greg Egan and Ron Hale-Evans imagined cyborgian devices that extended the senses and physical powers of a human with augmented compute — prosthetics, exoskeletons, exoselves. More recently, theorist Anders Sandberg widened the term to include the expanding circle of self we get from social media and culture itself; he would even include the act of writing text as part of our exoself. He defines exoselves as “systems linked to the self in a cooperative way, extending the mind and the body — systems that can blur the border between the core self and the world.” In this sense, digital technology extends our minds the way industrialism extended the human body. Microphones and speakers extend the ear and mouth (talk to your family across an ocean); wheels extend the foot; steam shovels expand our arms. AI and adjacent technologies extend the boundary of where we end and our minds begin.
The very concept of the self is itself a fairly recent invention. The idea that we each have an atomic, central self — one that needs improvement and care — mostly dawned as...