From groundbreaking innovations to bold visions, our 2025 Fellows share their predictions on where technology is headed—and the impact it could have on the world.
One in ten humans now use AI. That number will grow, but more interesting is how.
The browser is where it all started for consumer AI — its birthing pool. But two years on, Sam Altman’s baby has become a toddler. AI is now grasping for control over the shiny toy it sees in our hands: the smartphone. Early, fumbling attempts have lowered our guard. Apple Intelligence has not blown many minds, and neither have AI offerings from other big smartphone players.
In 2025, someone (Tim? Sundar?) will overwrite these false starts and announce the future: irresistibly useful agentic AI, delivered directly to billions via their phones.
That’s when our horcrux problem starts. You may wonder: what does the future of AI have to do with dark magic from Harry Potter? Quite a lot, actually.
During his bizarrely unchaperoned teenage years, Harry places a locket around his neck which contains a fragment of Lord Voldemort’s evil soul. This locket, called a horcrux, uses its closeness to Harry to control his thoughts.
Our AI phones will be like horcruxes. Yes, they’ll be useful. But they’ll also feature the problems we already see in AI: dishonesty, bias, toxicity, power asymmetries, extractive practices. They’ll be right there in our hands, throughout our waking hours. And crucially, because of the smartphone oligopoly, they’ll serve the fragments of one of two souls (Tim, Sundar).
A quick flashback: a few years ago I made a tool called Unfollow Everything, which deleted your Facebook News Feed. Facebook found it, sent me a cease-and-desist, and banned me for life.
Last year, a professor at UMass Amherst, Ethan Zuckerman, sued Meta to be able to launch a new version of my tool. Zuckerman wants you to be able to turn your Facebook app into what he calls a ‘loyal client’. Don’t like the News Feed? No problem. Your loyal client will delete it.
The horcrux AI phones of the future will be the ultimate disloyal clients. With unprecedented access to our digital lives, they’ll control our attention far more than social feeds — which will seem quaint by comparison.
If we care about consumers using trustworthy AI, we need to do something about these horcruxes.
Louis Barclay is a 2025 Mozilla Fellow.
From groundbreaking innovations to bold visions, our 2025 Fellows share their predictions on where technology is headed—and the impact it could have on the world.