The daemon moment has arrived (but it's being built backwards)

There’s a simple query that’s been making the rounds among tech journalists and AI enthusiasts: “Find the first email with my wife.” It should be trivial, for example with Google’s Gemini having access to your entire Gmail history. The infrastructure for personal AI is being built by every major lab, with billions in investment and aggressive timelines.

Yet the query fails. Consistently, instructively.

When I started writing about personal AI six months ago, the daemon vision felt theoretical - a thought experiment about what AI could become if we built it around continuous relationship rather than stateless service. Now, suddenly, it’s not theoretical at all. The major labs are racing toward exactly what I described: AI that knows you, learns from your data, becomes personalized to your context and needs.

Minimum viable soul

After months of building infrastructure and hitting walls, after documenting why Personal AI is harder than it looks, after questioning what it even means for an AI to “know” someone, I feel I am stuck. I feel like I am at a crossroads with multiple paths forward, none clearly superior, each with its own trade-offs that will only become apparent after you have traveled far into it.

This paper is an inflection point in my series. My previous papers have been written after the fact, they documented what I discovered. Now we have caught up - this paper documents the decision point itself - the messy middle where theoretical understanding meets practical choices, where vision meets implementation constraints, where perfect becomes the enemy of good enough.

Corporate AI vs personal AI - the coming tension

Every employment contract contains a comfortable fiction: when an employee leaves, they take their “experience” but leave the “work product”. The employee’s brain somehow perfectly segregates patterns learned from documents produced, insights gained from data analyzed, capabilities developed from problems solved. Companies have always accepted this fiction because human memory is imperfect, degrades over time, and can’t be audited.

We pay senior employees more precisely because they carry this accumulated experience. We value “10 years of experience” on resumes. We conduct exit interviews trying desperately to capture some fraction of what is walking out the door. We even created an entire knowledge management industry that largely fails at preventing expertise from leaving with people. The professional economy is built on individuals owning their cognitive development while companies own their work output.