Your phone won't die, but your AI agent will retire it
Meta unveils the Muse Charm, a pendant with cameras and an AI agent. A police officer and sci-fi author explains why your phone is about to lose its throne.
LA CIENCIA DEL BUCLE
Jose M. Aldasoro
10/1/20266 min read
Mark Zuckerberg closed Meta Connect with a product that wasn't on the script: a keychain-sized pendant with a screen, two cameras and an animated character that looks like a Tamagotchi. It's called the Muse Charm, and inside it "lives" Muse, Meta's AI agent. The easy reaction is to laugh and remember the Humane AI Pin. I think that's a mistake: the pendant will probably fail, but the idea inside it is going to win.
What the Muse Charm is, and why not even Meta thinks it will replace your phone
According to Xataka, drawing on the launch and on Bloomberg's reporting, the Muse Charm has a two-inch OLED touchscreen, 5G, two cameras (front and back), a speaker, microphones and a fingerprint sensor on the side. You press your finger and talk to the agent without unlocking your phone or opening an app. You wear it on a keyring, round your neck or on your wrist. The cameras are not mainly there for photos: they give the agent "eyes" so it understands what is in front of you. Meta expects to put it on sale in December; it has not announced a price, and Muse is currently only available in the United States.
What's telling is what the company itself said. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told Bloomberg he expects most people to use Muse through glasses and phones, not through the pendant. Meta isn't selling it as a phone replacement but as an accessory for die-hard fans. It has learned from the industry's casualties: the Rabbit R1 sold around 100,000 units and months later barely 5% of buyers were using it; the Humane AI Pin promised to make the smartphone obsolete and ended up unsupported, a 700-dollar paperweight.
My point is not that a gadget will replace the phone. It's something else, and I find it more unsettling.
Want to see how an artificial intelligence decides what stays in a case file and what gets erased? Read the secret case file that ZEUS flagged for deletion: a report written the way a police officer would write it, with a scene from The Loop that never made it into the novel.
The phone doesn't die: it stops being the door
For fifteen years the phone has been the door to everything: the bank, email, maps, the calendar, conversation. One app for each thing; for each app, an icon you have to find, open and learn. An AI agent removes that step. You don't open apps: you ask for what you want in plain language and the agent handles it. Meta has already put it inside WhatsApp, where half the world types without thinking.
When the interface is a conversation, the device stops mattering. Whether the agent lives in glasses, a pendant, the car or the phone itself, it's the same agent, with the same memory, following you from one device to the next. The phone won't disappear overnight, just as the landline didn't. It will stay in your pocket as a modem with a battery and a backup screen, and you will take it out less and less. What you really carry won't be a device. It will be an agent.
And an agent that goes everywhere with you, with eyes and ears, is something a police officer looks at differently.
A witness that never blinks
In many investigations the phone is already the most complete witness to a person's life. In Spain, operators must keep communications traffic and location data for twelve months (Law 25/2007), and hand it over only with a court order. Searching the contents of a seized phone also requires, as a general rule, judicial authorisation under the Criminal Procedure Act (articles 588 sexies a and following). Those safeguards were designed for a device that mostly records who we talked to and where we were.
An agent with two cameras and several microphones, built to understand its surroundings, records something else: context. What you were looking at, what was said around you, what you asked it and when. It is a witness that never blinks or forgets, and the questions it raises are not science fiction: where what it captures is stored, who keeps custody of it, how you prove it hasn't been altered, and whether what the agent "understood" about a scene is worth as much as what actually happened. In a police report, the difference between what is seen and what is interpreted is everything. An AI agent doesn't separate the two unless someone forces it to.
I don't know how the courts will answer those questions. I do know they will arrive before the law has thought about them.
When the agent chooses for you, your own name will be the one thing it can't automate
There's a less obvious consequence. If the agent is the door, it will also be the filter. It will summarise the news for you, suggest what to read and choose among a thousand options without you seeing the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. In that world, anonymous, generic content becomes invisible: any machine can produce it and any machine can replace it.
What survives is what can't be manufactured: a name with verifiable experience behind it. That's why I don't introduce myself simply as "a science fiction writer", but as the police officer who writes the thrillers of the future. It isn't a slogan: it's the one thing an agent can't invent on my behalf. I'm a police officer, and it's that job, not imagination, that I bring into my novels.
In The Loop I imagined an artificial intelligence, ZEUS, capable of flagging a case file for deletion. When I wrote it, it was fiction. Watching Meta hang a camera-equipped agent round its users' necks, I'm starting to think it was an early report.
Ten years from now nobody will ask which phone you have. They'll ask who you tell your life to, and who keeps the copy.
Next read
Every police report is a story, and it has an author
The day the perpetrator is not a person
The Loop: the science fiction thriller behind the case file ZEUS tried to erase.
The police officer who writes the thrillers of the future.
© 2026 Jose M. Aldasoro