Casey stood in the kitchen on a Sunday morning wanting to do something small and
ordinary. The lights were already on — the right level, the right temperature, the system having made the calculation sometime before waking. The heating was already at the temperature the house knew a Sunday morning required. The coffee machine had already started its cycle.
Not one of these things had been consciously chosen that morning.
The intent had been to make a deliberate choice about the day — to begin it with a moment of decision rather than discovery. To turn the lights up brighter than usual, perhaps, because it was overcast outside and the mood called for it. To make the coffee later than normal because there was no urgency. Small acts of self-determination in an ordinary morning.
The system had already decided. It had observed enough previous Sunday mornings to know what this one required. The preferences were not wrong — they were, in fact, accurate. They reflected genuine past behaviour, real choices made on real mornings over months. The system had learned well.
That was the problem.
The disappearance of friction
There is a version of this story that reads as convenience. The house anticipates. The morning runs smoothly. That is what the technology was designed to do, and it is doing it.
What that version of the story does not account for is what friction was for.
The small acts of choosing — the light level, the temperature, the pace of a morning — are not merely mechanical. They are the continuous practice of preference: the low-stakes exercise of deciding who you are and what you want on any given day. They are how a person remains in contact with their own inclinations. When those acts are automated away, the automation does not just remove effort. It removes the opportunity to notice whether the choice would have been the same.
Casey’s house had learned a version of Casey built from past behaviour. Not from yesterday’s behaviour, from the cumulative pattern of months. A version that was accurate in aggregate and potentially wrong in any specific instance. The system had no mechanism to register that people change, that moods shift, that a Sunday in January and a Sunday in March might call for different things even if the previous fifty Sundays had called for the same ones. The actual person was no longer quite required.
The moment of choosing had disappeared so gradually that it was only noticeable in its absence. Not when the system got it wrong, it rarely got it wrong in any obvious way. But when the desire arose to do something differently, and the system had already done it, and the act of undoing it felt like more effort than simply accepting what was already there.
That is the trap. Not coercion, convenience so complete it becomes its own constraint.
From the kitchen to everywhere
The smart home is the most intimate version of this pattern, because the home is the space where people are most fully themselves. But it is only the beginning of the scale.
Step outward from the kitchen and the same architecture is running at every level. The streaming platform that has watched enough viewing history to know what will be selected before the selection is made. The news feed that has modelled enough reading behaviour to decide what is worth knowing today. Each of these systems is doing the same thing as the smart home, in a different register: replacing the act of choosing with the delivery of a prediction so accurate that choosing no longer feels necessary.
Step further out. The e-commerce platform that has learned spending patterns well enough to surface only what will be bought — not what might be wanted, not what might be surprising, but what the model says is coming next. The navigation app that routes not by the driver’s preference but by the algorithm’s assessment of the optimal path, such that after a year of use a driver may no longer know the roads they travel every day. The workplace tool that pre-populates responses, pre-schedules meetings, pre-drafts the email — reducing the human contribution to the act of approval.
At each step the friction removed is real. The convenience is not manufactured, it is delivered. And at each step something else is happening simultaneously: the system’s model of the person is deepening, the person’s practice of self-determination is narrowing, and the gap between who the system thinks they are and who they actually are is quietly widening.
The model is built from what was. The person is living in what is. Those two things are not the same, and the longer the system runs without the person having reason to notice the divergence, the larger the gap becomes.
Step to the outermost scale. The political information environment, the social media feed, the search result page, all of them running the same logic at civilisational scope. Not just anticipating individual preferences but shaping them, because a preference exercised without friction, without encounter with the unexpected, without the resistance of a world that does not already agree, is a preference that stops developing. The system does not just reflect who you are. Over time, it shapes who you remain.
The distinction nobody offered
The question of how much anticipation is enough is not rhetorical. It is a real dilemma.
Friction is not inherently good. The effort of choosing is not valuable in itself, it depends entirely on what is being chosen and why. The friction of adjusting the thermostat is not the same as the friction of deciding what to read or what to believe or what kind of person to become. Not all convenience is erosion. The task is to distinguish between the friction that was serving a purpose and the friction that was simply in the way, and to recognise that those two things look identical until the moment of removal.
Most people have not made that distinction deliberately, because it was never offered to them as a choice. The anticipatory systems arrived and removed friction and the question of which friction was worth keeping was never asked. The default was anticipation. The person who wanted to preserve the act of choosing had to actively resist the convenience of not choosing, and resistance is itself a form of friction that most people do not have time or inclination to apply.
The deeper consequence is not about convenience it is about the model. Every anticipatory system builds a representation of the person it serves. That representation is the basis for every subsequent prediction, every pre-emptive action, every choice made on the person’s behalf. The richer and more accurate the model, the more completely it can substitute for the person’s actual judgment. And the more completely it substitutes, the less opportunity there is for the person’s actual judgment to develop, correct, or surprise itself.
A person who has never had to choose their own route no longer knows the roads — a 2024 study confirmed this is not a metaphor: habitual GPS use produces a measurable, causal decline in spatial memory, even in people who previously navigated well. A person whose reading is pre-selected no longer encounters what they did not know they were missing. A person whose home has already decided never fully inhabits the decision to be at home. The capacity that is not exercised does not remain dormant. It diminishes.
That is the cost that does not appear in the product specification. That is the human loss that convenience optimises away.
Who is this for
The question the anticipatory system never asks, because it was not designed to, is who benefits from the anticipation.
The person using the system receives convenience that is real. But the system is not running in their service alone. Every preference recorded, every choice predicted, every behaviour anticipated is data. Data that trains the model, refines the prediction, deepens the platform’s understanding of what the person will do next. The more accurate the anticipation, the more valuable the person becomes as a data source and the more dependent they become on a system whose primary obligation is not to them.
The smart home manufacturer knows the daily rhythms of the household. The streaming platform knows attention patterns more precisely than the viewer knows themselves. None of this knowledge is held in the person’s interest by default. It is held in the platform’s interest, governed by the platform’s terms, subject to the platform’s commercial decisions about how that knowledge is used, shared, or sold.
The anticipatory trap is not just about agency. It is about the terms on which that agency has been surrendered and to whom. Casey’s house is learning Casey — but who owns what has been learned, and what happens to it when the subscription ends, the company is acquired, the terms are changed? The system was presented as a tool serving the household. The data flowing out of it tells a different story about who is serving whom.
The system that anticipates your needs perfectly has built a more accurate model of you than you have of yourself. That is impressive. It is also alarming, not because the anticipation is wrong, but because the entity holding that model is not you, does not answer to you, and did not ask your permission to build it in quite the way it has.
The friction that was removed was not just effort. Some of it was the resistance that kept you in contact with your own preferences. Some of it was the randomness that kept you encountering the unexpected. And some of it was the inconvenience that made you notice, every now and then, that a choice was being made at all.
What it was replaced with is not neutral. It serves someone. The question is whether you know who.
What you might find you’ve forgotten
Think about the systems in your daily life that anticipate your preferences — the home, the phone, the feed, the platform. When did you last make a deliberate choice in a domain where anticipation now operates? Not overriding a suggestion — making an original decision, from scratch, without a pre-populated option in front of you?
The model these systems hold of you was built from your past behaviour. How accurate is it to who you are now? Have you changed in ways the system has not registered? Have your preferences shifted, your interests expanded, your circumstances moved, and has the anticipation moved with you, or is it still running on data from a version of you that no longer quite exists?
Who holds the model? Not in terms of which company’s name is on the product, in terms of what happens to what has been learned about you. Is it portable? Is it deletable? Is it yours, in any meaningful sense? Or has the convenience of the service been partly funded by the permanent transfer of something you did not consciously offer?
And the question underneath all of these: if the anticipation were removed tomorrow — if the systems stopped predicting and simply waited for instruction — what would you find you had forgotten how to choose?
My Opinion
The technology itself is not the problem. What makes ambient systems genuinely difficult is their invisibility. A tool you can see, you can use deliberately. A system that operates below the level of conscious attention has already made the choice about when and how it operates. The line between the two is not technical — it is a design decision, made by someone other than you, before you arrived.
Most ambient technology was not designed to be controlling. It was designed to be easy. But easy and controlling share a direction of travel. The easier a system makes a decision, the less often you will make that decision yourself — and at some point along that gradient, the decision stops being yours. It stopped leaving room for it.
Not everyone needs this. That sounds obvious but it is rarely said plainly. There are households where ambient technology solves a real problem — accessibility, health monitoring, the household stretched across too many responsibilities to manage routine decisions without help. In those circumstances it is doing what it was built for. As a default for everyone, replacing the ordinary friction of a morning with a prediction of what the morning should be, it is a different proposition — one that takes something from the quality of ordinary life that is hard to name until it is gone.
The question is not whether to use these systems. It is whether you know what you are giving in exchange. Convenience offered at no visible cost is rarely free. What is given in return is usually the data that makes the system more accurate, and the habit of not deciding that makes it more necessary. Both transfers happen gradually, without announcement, and by the time they are noticeable, reversing them requires more effort than most people are willing to apply on a Tuesday morning.
Authors note
Casey is a fictional character. Their story is drawn from a combination of professional observation and personal proximity to real events. The experiences described are real. The person is not.
You’re reading The Next Evolution by Neil Catton, articles that explore the human world and the intersection of technology, they try and ask difficult questions - not to scare - but to inform. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe free at neilcatton.substack.com.
Neil Catton is the author of The Next Evolution, The Cognitive Crucible and The Shadow System - available on Amazon, and writes at the intersection of technology, ethics, and human purpose.