Someday real soon, most of us \u2014 starting with young adults \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While we will use more than one agent, we\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 better than almost any human could \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It won\u2019t feel strange, because we don\u2019t 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p> I write about the controversial idea of an "exoself" as if it were inevitable: https:\/\/t.co\/nds5pW2b0r<\/a><\/p>— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 7, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote>