Adding AI...to our Keychains?

By Joanna Y. '30

Imagine forgetting to order lunch and having an AI on your keychain take care of it for you. Now imagine that same AI reading your emails, managing your calendar, and buying things for you. It sounds like science fiction, but on Sept. 23, Meta unveiled Charm, a device that's coming this December.

And it raises questions that are getting harder to ignore. If AI can run our errands now, will it start doing all our jobs, too? How much of our personal lives are we willing to hand over for convenience? And by the time we graduate from CPS, what will work, and life, even look like?

Charm is about the size of an AirPods case and lets users talk to Muse, Meta’s new AI agent. Muse, which launched Sept. 8, is designed to complete tasks instead of just answering questions, like sending emails, booking tickets and making reservations.

It’s also spreading fast. Muse recently surpassed ChatGPT to become the No. 1 free app on Apple's U.S. App Store, with more than 2.5 million downloads since its launch, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. Still, downloads don't indicate whether people will keep using it.

All of Muse’s convenience depends on access. To get tasks done, Muse connects to largely private resources like email, calendars, payment platforms, and shopping apps. Miranda Bogen of the Center for Democracy & Technology told CNN that AI agents “typically need an enormous amount of private data to function,” which raises questions about data safety and privacy. However, Meta has reassured those concerned that Muse was designed with privacy in mind, including secure storage for passwords and credit cards that the AI itself can’t read.

So intrusion concerns aside, why develop Charm as a keychain? The answer is clear: Charm is part of a much bigger race. Tech companies are searching for whatever comes after the smartphone, trying everything from smart glasses to wearable pins to handheld convenience gadgets. Meta already has a head start: its AI glasses, made with Ray-Ban, were one of the first hits. Now it's betting its next big thing will fit in your pocket.

Some of Muse's features exist just for fun. Users will soon be able to create a digital avatar for their AI and video chat with it. Charm itself has a two-inch OLED (a light-emitting diode) touchscreen and a fingerprint sensor that reportedly includes a camera. These fun features make having Muse feel less like an AI robot, or more like a fun assistant.

There's also a catch for high schoolers: Muse is only available to users 18 and older. Even so, it's worth asking: how much would you trust an AI to run your life? And are you inadvertently doing so in some ways already, even by using basic search engines?

For now, Charm is still just a promise. Nobody outside Meta has tested it, and there's no price yet. But it's a glimpse of where tech might be headed: toward AI that doesn't just answer our questions, but runs our errands, plans our weeks, and rides along in our pockets. When Charm ships in December, we'll start to find out whether that future is exciting, a little scary, or just another gadget that ends up in a junk drawer.