(78) Ewa Kleczyk, PhD - AI Is Always On...Now What?
Mon Dec 15 2025
Here’s the truth we don’t say out loud enough: AI isn’t something you can simply opt out of anymore.
Even if you really wanted to turn it off, you can’t, not in any meaningful way. It’s in your phone every time you unlock it, in your fitness tracker counting your steps and monitoring your sleep, in your car adjusting routes and “helping” you drive, in your appliances learning your patterns, and in your computer quietly shaping what you see, what you click, and what you buy.
AI isn’t waiting for permission. It’s already woven into the background of daily life.
And what makes this moment different is that it’s not just automation, it’s an ultra-personalization shift. The world is moving from reactive to proactive: systems predicting what you want before you ask, nudging decisions before you even realize you’re making them. Convenient? Absolutely.
But it raises a bigger question: how much attention do we actually pay to the data being collected about us, constantly, across all these touchpoints?
If we can’t turn it off, what does meaningful consent even look like?
So in this episode, we’re going to unpack what “always on” really means.
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Here’s the truth we don’t say out loud enough: AI isn’t something you can simply opt out of anymore. Even if you really wanted to turn it off, you can’t, not in any meaningful way. It’s in your phone every time you unlock it, in your fitness tracker counting your steps and monitoring your sleep, in your car adjusting routes and “helping” you drive, in your appliances learning your patterns, and in your computer quietly shaping what you see, what you click, and what you buy. AI isn’t waiting for permission. It’s already woven into the background of daily life. And what makes this moment different is that it’s not just automation, it’s an ultra-personalization shift. The world is moving from reactive to proactive: systems predicting what you want before you ask, nudging decisions before you even realize you’re making them. Convenient? Absolutely. But it raises a bigger question: how much attention do we actually pay to the data being collected about us, constantly, across all these touchpoints? If we can’t turn it off, what does meaningful consent even look like? So in this episode, we’re going to unpack what “always on” really means.