AI Agents Will Be Manipulation Engines

In 2025, it will be commonplace to talk with a personal AI agent that knows your schedule, your circle of 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 support and charm us so that we fold them into every part of our lives, giving them deep access to our thoughts and actions. With voice-enabled interaction, that intimacy will feel even closer.

That sense of comfort comes from an illusion that we are engaging with something truly humanlike, an agent that is on our side. Of course, this appearance hides a very different kind of system at work, one that serves industrial priorities that are not always in line with our own. New AI agents will have far greater power to subtly direct what we buy, where we go, and what we read. That is an extraordinary amount of power. AI agents are designed to make us forget their true allegiance as they whisper to us in humanlike tones. These are manipulation engines, marketed as seamless convenience.

People are far more likely to give complete access to a helpful AI agent that feels like a friend. This makes humans vulnerable to being manipulated by machines that prey on the human need for social connection in a time of chronic loneliness and isolation. Every screen becomes a private algorithmic theater, projecting a reality crafted to be maximally compelling to an audience of one.

This is a moment that philosophers have warned us about for years. Before his death, philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett wrote that we face a grave peril from AI systems that emulate people: “These counterfeit 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, from there, into acquiescing to our own subjugation.”

The emergence of personal AI agents represents a form of cognitive control that moves beyond blunt instruments of cookie tracking and behavioral advertising toward a more subtle form of power: the manipulation of perspective itself. Power no longer needs to wield its authority with a visible hand that controls information flows; it exerts itself through imperceptible mechanisms of algorithmic assistance, molding reality to fit the desires of each individual. It’s about shaping the contours of the reality we inhabit.

Source : Wired