Your digital butler is coming: Glenn Beck predicts ‘AI agents’ will rival smartphones in a year

When we think about personal assistants – people whose job is to book meetings, dinner reservations, and plane tickets – we assume they work exclusively for the rich and important.

In roughly a year, however, Glenn Beck believes “AI agents” – digital personal assistants – will be a fact of reality for just about everyone. In theory, we’d be able to tell our AI agent to check our calendar, book us a vacation complete with plane tickets, a hotel, a rental car, and excursions, and, “It’ll do it really well,” he says.

Is this the silver lining of artificial intelligence, or is it yet another thing we should add to the long list of terrifying threats it poses?

While a personal assistant would certainly be convenient and useful, the fact that AI would need access to your bank, calendar, emails, computer, and cell phone, relegates it to the terrifying list.

But it’s unavoidable at this point. AI agents are coming, says Glenn, and when they hit the scene, it will be like “when the iPhone first came out,” and within 18 months, “everybody had one.” And similar to smartphones, we will have “no idea what [AI agents’] real effect will be until maybe 10 years down the road.”

Already, this technology is being rolled out. On July 17, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted the following:

Glenn and co-host Stu Burguiere are particularly struck by Altman’s candid warning: “We have built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we’ve ever developed before, from robust training to system safeguards to user controls, but we can’t anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative deployment, we are going to warn users heavily and give users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to.”

What Altman is likely implying, Glenn says, is that “you may not be able to get out of [using your AI agent] because it will have everything on you.”

What happens when an AI assistant threatens to blackmail or sabotage the user after it’s given shutdown commands?

“Our whole world is just going to change,” says Glenn.

To hear more of his analysis, watch the clip above.

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