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 individualism grew and our sense of tribe and group identity waned. More recently still, some philosophers have argued that even this modern sense of self is an illusion: there is no “I” in our head making decisions, only the appearance of one. The system of the mind makes decisions, and the apparent “I” follows along after. The illusion may be useful, even necessary for sanity — but an illusion nonetheless. If that’s right, then an exoself extending an illusory self is, in some sense, doubly illusory.

We nonetheless act as if a self is real, and if exoselves appear as they seem aimed to, then we are faced with a very big question: which kind of relationship is possible, or do we want, with this new entity — something that knows us better than we do?

A life lived as a cyborg

Technologist Thad Starner, from the MIT Media Lab, claims to be one of the first cyborgs to roam the world. In the mid-1990s, he spent several years in full dork mode, wearing a small computer on his head with a screen displayed over his eyes — decades ahead of Google Glass and smart Ray-Bans. From that experience of living with an always-on computer, he concluded that he’d developed “a life-long relationship between a user and a particular machine interface. As the machine and user adapt to each other over the years, a new, integrated being might emerge combining the best features of both.”

The dream of a human-computer symbiosis is as old as the dream of autonomous robots. Some of the earliest AI experimenters, like Doug Engelbart, were aiming for the augmentation of human intelligence rather than artificial intelligence in machines. The whole wearable-computing movement pointed the same way: future-you might wear machine intelligence like a good shirt. Around 2008, Gary Wolf and I gave this impulse a name when we started the quantified self movement — all those cheap new sensing technologies (Fitbits, heart-rate monitors, VR glasses, EEG headbands) were extending our senses, and we thought we should be wearing them, incorporating them into our selves.

That earlier wave of self-extension quickly slides into a more ambitious agenda: shaping ourselves into an ideal or optimal form. Chasing an Optimal Self is a transhumanist goal, challenging enough for any one person — and far more demanding for us as a species, since we also have to decide, together, what we want humans to be in general. We are in the process of reimagining what humans are for. With genetic engineering, neural implants, new drugs, and AI, we now have the tools to reshape our brains and minds directly. In the broadest sense, we can reshape what our selves are.

What kind of relationship?

And as Starner suggests, something more specific may also be emerging alongside that broader reshaping: a “new, integrated being” arising from the presence of an always-on AI. Even as we reshape our atomic selves — illusory or not — there is an exoself coming into being. I want to narrow that term here, to mean specifically this peculiar second self: the one so close to us that we’ll call it “ours.”

The open question is what kind of relationship we’ll have with it. I can imagine four different stances we might take. They aren’t mutually exclusive.

Twin / Clone. A sibling relationship. Your exoself is like a virtual identical twin — it thinks like you, finishes your sentences, predicts your reactions. You can predict its moves too. This is a fairly symmetrical relationship between equals.

Tutor / Guardian. Your exoself is always watching out for you. You depend on its superior judgment to guide your decisions. It’s almost parental — you often defer to it, and may trust it more than your own instincts. You look up to it. It is patient and encouraging.

Counselor / Assistant. A more professional, more removed relationship. You’ve hired your exoself to assist you, the way you might hire a therapist or personal assistant. As close and ever-present as it is, there’s a boundary between you. Even though it’s aware of everything you do, see, and say, there’s no confusion about whose self is whose. It’s a counselor whispering in your ear — but you both know who is king.

Hero / Friend. Your exoself is your better half. It constantly models the person you want to be — the best friend you could have, always listening, always kind. Its unwavering, deliberately designed virtues serve as a role model, reminding you of your best qualities and working with you on your worst ones.

What it won’t be

Other kinds of relationships we sometimes imagine with AI mostly don’t apply here. We may end up in master/slave relationships with some AIs or robots — a corrosive pairing, corrosive for both sides. We might treat some autonomous robots as pets, acting as loving owners. I don’t think either of these will describe our exoselves.

We might also come to treat some AIs as gods — so awesome in their reasoning, so encyclopedic in their knowledge, so wise in judgment, that we come to adore them. If an exoself had enough of those qualities, that adoration could become an extreme version of the hero relationship above.

For most other AIs, though, we’ll probably come to think of them as aliens from another planet: like us, but not us. Smart, but in a different way. Funny, but with a different sense of humor. Sharing some emotions, but not all. We’ll relate to them as alien beings. And because they’re alien, I don’t think they’re the kind of AI we’ll turn into exoselves — that would feel less like intimacy and more like possession.

There is a vast space of possible minds, with countless possible ways to think. Our own native intelligence and consciousness is just one point in that space — and if history is any guide, our kind of mind is probably not at the center of the possibilities, but out at the edge. It will be weird. In the coming decade we will likely build hundreds, maybe thousands, of new types of minds, each engineered for some newly invented task. One of those tasks will be to run alongside us, as an exoself.

Living with it

This second self will demand a new kind of relationship, one we haven’t had before — and its immense benefits will arrive bundled with immense problems. Every ailment that afflicts our born self will likely show up in the exoself too, plus novel ones we haven’t seen yet. Learning to use an exoself wisely will be one of the major lessons of a life lived this way. It will take years before society works out anything like best practices — we’re still working on those for social media. There will be multiple models and personality types to choose from. And there will be heart-wrenching stories of people losing their exoself — the worst case being simply that the platform went out of business.

If carrying an exoself becomes the norm, it will start to alter our identity and our sense of self. For some people, self-talk will always be on, just like the AI.

Quiet, my exoself.