Ariana Bindman writes:

According to an October report from Yahoo Finance, Muse has been downloaded at least 5 million times since its launch in early September, earning 3 million concurrent users per week. Marketed as a round-the-clock digital serf whose entire existence is literally “built around your whole life,” Muse is meant to buy back users’ time by taking care of mundane busy work, Meta says. Based on reviews from tech reporters, it’s surprisingly capable and efficient.

It can call insurance companies on your behalf and wait on hold for you, order groceries, book hotels and manage subscriptions. Other human tasks like buying plane tickets and grocery shopping — as well as planning your wife’s birthday dinner and setting aside time to read to your kids before bed — can all now be offloaded to a digital avatar resembling an adorable abominable snowman. Chances are we’ll start seeing it everywhere.

But there’s a frightening caveat: In order for Muse to accomplish these tasks, it basically wants back door access to your entire life. In addition to storing logins and passwords and linking your bank account information, it wants to see your messages, personal calendar and contacts, requesting more sensitive information than virtually any other AI app, according to ZDNET.

“I ended up relying on it for everything,” said New York Times tech reporter Eli Tan in an Oct. 6 conversation with “The Daily.” Instead of “thinking for myself, my first instinct was to go to Muse and ask it instead.”

“It’s like I had just given over all my cognitive ability to this thing, and it was concerning. I really felt like it had taken over my brain,” he continued, adding that this “takeover” is what major companies imagine people using it for.

Keep in mind, this is a product from a man whose company has been accused of facilitating the gathering of millions of people’s psychological data in order to sway the outcome of the 2016 election.

Given the fact that Meta makes most of its revenue from ads, it’s also perfectly clear why its overlord Mark Zuckerberg is giving us, the commoners, such a powerful tool for free.

“The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us,” media theorist and CNN columnist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. “They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers.” Instead of paying firms to conduct research on consumers, by constantly engaging with Meta’s products, we provide it for them, he argued. More than a decade later, this sentiment couldn’t feel more true. [Continue reading…]