Why AI Agents Are Splitting Your Soul Into Pieces

Dr Mark van Rijmenam, CSP -

Ask ChatGPT to "just handle this" and you're Voldemort dividing your soul. Except instead of immortality, you're achieving digital serfdom.

OpenAI's July 2025 ChatGPT agent promises "full control with human-in-the-loop." Tony Fish and Gam Dias see something darker: Every delegation fragments your agency like Rowling's dark wizard splitting his soul into Horcruxes. Each feels harmless. Together they're catastrophic.

Remember privacy? You can't pinpoint when you lost it because it wasn't stolen, it leaked through a thousand tiny surrenders. Loyalty cards, social media permissions, smartphone apps. Cambridge Analytica wasn't a breach; it was the inevitable endpoint of our gradual capitulation. Now we're doing it again with human agency itself.

The executive who can't schedule without AI, write emails without assistance, or make decisions without algorithmic guidance isn't empowered, they're disabled. When systems fail, they don't lose efficiency; they lose function entirely. Fish warns: "When does assistance become automation, and automation become abdication?"

Like sliced bread reshaped to fit machines rather than humans, we're reshaping ourselves for AI convenience. Your calendar agent talks to your email agent, coordinating with your investment agent. An ecosystem that knows you better than yourself, predicting needs before you recognize them. Not fragmenting agency, rebuilding it in silicon, distributed across networks beyond your control.

  • Privacy lost through thousand-cuts of digital convenience
  • Executives becoming vestigial organs in their own organizations
  • AI aggregation creating emergent intelligence we can't comprehend

❓ When your AI makes better decisions than you because you've forgotten how to make them, are you still the architect of your destiny or just another node in the network?

Read the full article on Open Governance.

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