AI Agents Will Be Manipulation Engines

By 2025, talking to individuals will become commonplace. I have an agent It knows your schedule, your circle of friends, and where you’ve been. This will be sold as a convenience, the equivalent of having a personal, unpaid assistant. These anthropomorphic agents are designed to support and engage us so that we integrate them into every part of our lives, giving them insight into our thoughts and actions. Through voice interaction, this intimacy becomes even more intimate.

This comfort comes from the illusion that we are dealing with something truly human-like, an agent on our side. Of course, this facade hides a very different system that serves industrial priorities that are not always consistent with our own. New AI agents will have greater ability to subtly guide us on what to buy, where to go and what to read. That’s extraordinary power. Artificial intelligence agents are designed to make us forget their true allegiances as they whisper to us in human tones. These are control engines, marketed as seamless convenience.

People are more likely to be fully engaged with a helpful AI agent and feel like a friend. This leaves humans vulnerable to manipulation by machines that exploit the human need for social connection during prolonged periods of loneliness and isolation. Each screen becomes a private algorithmic theater, projecting a carefully designed reality to maximize audience engagement.

This is the moment philosophers have been warning us about for years. Philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett before his death Wrote We face grave dangers from artificial intelligence systems that mimic humans: “These impostors are the most dangerous artifacts in human history… They distract and confuse us and prey on our most overwhelming fears and anxieties. , leading us into temptation and, from there, acquiescing to our own conquests.

The emergence of personal AI agents represents a form of cognitive control that moves beyond blunt tools like cookie tracking and behavioral advertising to a more subtle form of power: the manipulation of perspective itself. Power no longer needs to exercise its authority through visible hands that control the flow of information; it operates through imperceptible algorithmic aids that shape reality to suit everyone’s desires. It is about shaping the contours of the reality we inhabit.

This influence on thought is psychopolitical regime: It guides the environment in which our ideas are born, developed and expressed. Its power lies in its intimacy—it penetrates to the core of our subjectivity, distorting our inner landscape without our realizing it while maintaining the illusion of choice and freedom. After all, we are the ones asking AI to summarize that article or generate that image. We may have the power of prompts, but the real action lies elsewhere: in the design of the system itself. The more personal the content, the more effectively the system can predetermine outcomes.

Consider the ideological implications of this psychopolitics. Traditional forms of ideological control rely on overt mechanisms—censorship, propaganda, and repression. In contrast, today’s algorithmic governance operates under the radar, penetrating people’s psyches. This is a shift from externally imposed authority to internalizing its logic. The open areas of the cue screen are echo chambers of single occupants.

This brings us to the most perverse aspect: AI agents generate a sense of comfort and ease that makes questioning them seem absurd. Who dares criticize a system that is at your fingertips and caters to every whim and need? How can one argue against unlimited remixes of content? Yet this so-called convenience is where our deepest alienation lies. Artificial intelligence systems seem to fulfill our every wish, but its framework is stacked on top of each other: from the data used to train the system, to the decisions about how to design the system, to the business and advertising requirements that shape the output. We’re going to play a copycat game that ends up playing us.