Recently, the writer Brady Brickner-Wood spent a weekend outsourcing his life to Muse, Meta’s newly unveiled A.I. assistant. Meta has branded Muse as the “World’s First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone”; its standard avatar is a furry beige character that looks like a sanguine Labubu. “I suspect that Muse’s inviting, cuddly character designs are aimed at lowering my defenses so that I more readily provide it with all of my personal information, which I quickly learn is how this whole operation runs,” Brickner-Wood writes. “To conduct its business, Muse must be given access to your accounts: e-mails, Amazon, calendars, contacts, cloud storage, banks, credit cards, and social media—anything you might want it to manage on your behalf. It can book restaurant reservations, manage shipments, pick out and purchase your mother’s birthday gift, pay bills, summarize your e-mail inbox as a podcast, automate monotonous work tasks that, in the past, might have taken hours to complete,” he continues. “I can see how a person could get excited about this. But I find myself slightly distressed at the prospect of handing over my personal data and pathetically weak passwords to this Mark Zuckerberg-owned taskbot, just so that it can perform my trivial online biddings for me.” Read more about Brickner-Wood’s weekend with an A.I. assistant: newyorker.com/culture/infini…

What agentic A.I. is best at is optimizing processes that, not too long ago, were presented as the already maximally optimized version of a once analog experience. newyorker.com/culture/infini…

Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain. If we want to live in a world where “crime is unsustainable” and “a thing of the past,” in his words, then we must “sacrifice our privacy.” His solution: cameras. Cameras that can read the license plates of passing cars have been installed in every state but Alaska. Recently, Flock cameras have inspired increased outrage, which has taken the form of ordinary citizens damaging, stealing, and defacing them. Police officers have been accused of exploiting Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, track love interests, and surveil family members. In Texas, Flock camera data allowed law enforcement to incriminate a woman who had allegedly received a medical abortion. ICE has also used Flock data to track down and detain immigrants. “Listen to Langley talk long enough, and a core contradiction in his messaging emerges,” Brady Brickner-Wood writes. “By threatening us with the violent fantasies of an unsurveilled world, he is pushing something that strikes me as the antithesis of safety: a community ethic founded on suspicion, a closely monitored world with no exit.” newyorker.com/culture/infini…

Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials? newyorker.com/culture/infini…

Trump’s Cabinet has joined TikTok—and it’s not great. Brady Brickner-Wood examines the content so far. newyorker.com/culture/infini…

The scarcity of “The Odyssey” screenings in IMAX 70-mm. has raised the question: Will moviegoing become a luxury experience? newyorker.com/culture/infini…