October 2, 2026
The Year AI Comes Into the Room
A pendant, new glasses, and a screenless device for your pocket. My hope is that they give us back our presence.
Something changed this year that I can feel more than I can prove, and most of us are standing inside it without having named it yet.
Last year was the year of the chatbot. We opened a tab, typed a question, read the answer, closed the tab, and went back to our lives. The intelligence lived on the other side of a screen, and we had to go and visit it. This year has been the year of the agent, which acts on what you ask and carries a task forward while you do something else. And now the agent is leaving the screen.
Off the screen
In September, Meta released Muse, a personal agent you text the way you’d text a friend. It remembers what you tell it, fills out forms, books travel, and keeps working after you close the app. Two weeks later, at its Connect conference, Meta showed where Muse is going next. One piece is a small pendant called Muse Charm that fits in your pocket and exists for one thing, talking with your agent. Muse is also coming to Meta’s AI glasses, where you’ll be able to say your agent’s name and have it act on whatever you’re looking at, hands-free, and Meta showed a new audio-only pair built for talking with your assistant without a screen at all.
OpenAI is heading the same way. It bought Jony Ive’s design company last year, and by the most consistent reports its first device will fit in a pocket, take in its surroundings, and have no screen at all. Court filings say it won’t ship before next year, and more prototypes are reportedly behind it, a speaker for the room and glasses among them.
Put those together and the agent goes in your pocket, on your face, in your ear, and on the kitchen counter. In a sense, it comes among us.
The internet made this move before. It used to be a destination you got on at a desk and then got off. Now it’s the medium your life runs through, and nobody notices getting on anymore. Phones did the same thing to being reachable. Agents look to me like the next layer of that kind, a thin film of intelligence lying over the world, and we’ll stop noticing it the way we stop noticing the air.
What I’m hoping for
There’s something quietly artificial about how we’ve been living. We step away from the person in front of us, and from the task in our hands, to hunch over a screen and generate language that’s often slower and clumsier than if we’d simply spoken. We built machines to connect us and then let them pull us out of the room.
We’ve also let them cut us into compartments. Work lives in one window, family in a group text, prayer in an app, and the news in a feed, and we move between them all day without being fully inside any of them. You can sit at your kid’s game and be in your inbox at the same time, which means you’re at neither.
So I carry a hope I can’t prove. If the intelligence can live in the room instead of behind the glass, and I can just say what I need out loud and let it carry the logistics, then maybe I get to look up. Maybe the screen stops being the place I go to think, and I get to be where my body already is. We were made for more than staring down.
Proactivity could turn out to be the gift here. The old model waits for your prompt. The new one anticipates, and Muse already makes suggestions unprompted. Picture an email from your kid’s school: a field trip on the fourteenth, a form to sign, twelve dollars to send, a lunch to pack with no nuts in it. By the time you’d have opened it, the agent has handled what it can be trusted to handle, and you never took out your phone at dinner to do it.
What worries me
The same device that frees you from the screen could make distraction more intimate. A screen at least has edges, and you can turn it face down. A voice in your ear and a pendant waiting for its name have no face to turn down, and an agent that anticipates is also an agent that interrupts. The phone was supposed to free us from the desk, and it followed us to the dinner table. I don’t trust myself to be the exception this time. The thing that was supposed to gather my life together could become the most compartmentalizing object I’ve ever carried, a second life murmuring alongside the first.
Then there’s the question of who holds it. An agent that goes everywhere with us has to take in a great deal of our lives. Meta paid the FTC a five-billion-dollar privacy penalty in 2019, and the company says Muse keeps your data walled off from its advertising. That’s a promise it will have to earn.
So the hardware raises the stakes on a question most of us were already losing with the phone.
Among us, without flesh
I used the phrase “among us” on purpose, and carefully, because a Christian can’t hear it without hearing John: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). The machine comes among us from the other direction, without flesh. Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI says these systems “do not possess a body” and “do not feel joy or pain” (Magnifica Humanitas 99). It can be everywhere and present to no one, so the best it can do is leave room for ours.
That’s also why I’ve stopped calling the AI I work with an assistant, because an assistant waits to be told. “Co-creator” is closer to what working with it feels like, so I want to be exact about who the co-creator is. Pope Leo writes that we are “created in the image of the Creator” and that “our own work in some way continues his” (Magnifica Humanitas 148), and the Vatican’s earlier note on AI is plainer still: the machine is “a tool, not a person” (Antiqua et Nova 59). The co-creator in the room is me, and in yours it’s you.
The Catechism says “it is in the present that we encounter him, not yesterday nor tomorrow, but today” (CCC 2659), and a divided attention has a hard time arriving in today. The Greek word for the devil, diabolos, comes from a verb meaning to throw across, and from there to set at variance, while its opposite, symbolon, is something thrown together. The Second Vatican Council called the split between the faith many profess and their daily lives “among the more serious errors of our age” (Gaudium et Spes 43). The holy gathers a life back into one piece.
The guest in the room
Luke tells of a day when Martha welcomed Jesus into her house (Lk 10:38). She “was distracted with much serving,” while her sister Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching” (Lk 10:39-40). When Martha asks him to send Mary to help, he answers her gently: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion” (Lk 10:41-42). Martha’s serving was good: it was hospitality, and the guest was the Word made flesh. Augustine, preaching on this passage, is careful to say that her part was good and Mary’s was better (Sermon 103). Jesus names her anxiety, the many things pulling at her at once.
A machine can come into the room and carry some of the serving. It can fill out the form and keep track of the week while you catch your breath. It can’t be the guest, and it can’t choose the good portion for you.
If this technology is going to be worth anything, that’s the measure I’ll hold it to: whether it gives me back the room. So let it fill out the form and send the twelve dollars. Then pack the lunch yourself, and when the house is quiet, go and sit where Mary sat.
If this gave words to something you have been carrying, share it with someone who needs it.
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