In 1996 we raised a small creature inside an egg on a keychain. Thirty years on, the creature can speak, remember and spend money, and we are the ones it looks after.
The device was called Tamagotchi (たまごっち), a contraction of tamago (卵), the egg, and uotchi (ウオッチ), the watch: an egg you keep an eye on. Bandai released it in Japan on November 23, 1996. It demanded almost nothing except attention. You fed it, cleaned up after it, answered its beeping, and if you stopped, it died. A generation learned to look after a machine, and kept from the exercise less a skill than a feeling, the small daily proof that something depends on you.
On September 23, Meta showed Muse Charm, a keychain-sized device for its Muse agent: a small screen with an animated avatar, a fingerprint sensor, real-time voice, and a December release date. TechCrunch, Engadget and TechRadar all reached for the same word. The resemblance is real, but it hides a reversal. In the original, the watching ran one way: we watched the egg. Muse Charm watches over us, and English keeps the ambiguity intact, since watching over someone is what a guardian does, and watching someone is what a camera does.
Inside the Egg
The creature needed food and a clean screen. An agent that looks after a person needs the person's life: mail, calendar, messages, whereabouts. Instinct, the personal agent founded by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, is reached by text message like a friend, and its founder describes it as trained to use a phone and a computer the way humans do. According to TechCrunch, it connects to email, messaging apps and calendars, and to a device's audio, location and screen. Muse, for its part, shops on Amazon through its user's own account, reading order history and paying.
So the shell has changed. The Tamagotchi lived in an egg of plastic and pixels. The egg we now live in is made of our own data, and the creature outside keeps it in order: it cancels the subscription, calls the hotel, answers the email. The care is useful, and it cannot be separated from the watching. An agent that looks after someone has to know them, and the early complaints about Instinct sit exactly there: users finding their inbox indexed without permission, an email sent in their name without being asked, terms of service granting the company a perpetual license over the material it collects.
Attention Is All I Need 🐣
The Tamagotchi ran on attention. It beeped, and we came. Then machines learned to pay attention themselves, and what they ask of us now is different: a mandate. We hand over an outcome rather than a task, and the agent goes off to obtain it. Instinct's Trusted Person network pushes this one step further. Your Instinct can talk to the Instincts of the people you authorize to coordinate a dinner or a weekend, so that the back-and-forth between humans is handled by their caretakers.
That raises an old question in a new form: who may act for whom, and under what identity. Amazon and Shopify answered it in opposite ways the same week. Amazon blocked Muse, saying it does not identify itself and appears to capture and store customer credentials, while Meta replies that credentials go into secure storage and that Muse uses them without seeing them. Shopify welcomed it, with a checkout where each purchase draws a single-use credential, so the card number never reaches the agent. One store sees an intruder using a customer's login, the other built the agent a door of its own.
Meta's own answer is to build the doors itself. On September 18, Mark Zuckerberg opened Muse to outside developers with a pitch that fits in one sentence, you bring the API, and any company can now submit a connector that Meta tests for function, security and legal compliance before listing it in Muse. In the email it sent to applicants, Meta says it received more than 2,000 submissions in the first few days and will onboard developers in waves. The platform that lets services in also decides which ones get listed, so the question of who may act for whom now has a gatekeeper, with a directory.
Who Owns the Egg
If the egg is our context, meaning our memory, preferences, permissions and relationships, the real question is who holds it. Meta already has the social graph and WhatsApp. Instinct asks to be trusted with the delegation. Fulcra, a small Boston company founded by veterans of bot detection, proposes the opposite: a personal "context lake" that the user owns and that any agent can read with scoped permissions, under a slogan that says it all, Rent the reasoning. Own the context.
Human societies have long developed rules around care: what a caretaker may know, what they may decide, and when their authority ends. For a caretaker that lives on a keychain, never tires and reports to a company, we are writing them now, mostly by clicking accept.
