An always-on AI assistant is used daily by most adults in a country

The soft version of merging with machines: no surgery, no implant, only a habit. A person who asks an AI assistant questions through the day, drafts with it, remembers through it and checks their thinking against it is working in partnership with a machine, whatever they call it. Hundreds of millions of people now use such assistants every week. Whether most adults in any country use one every day is a question a survey can answer, and that is the bar this entry watches.

What would count

For one person: they use a general-purpose AI assistant (a chatbot or voice assistant that answers questions in ordinary language) on most days. For the leaf as named: a nationally representative survey of adults by a named polling organisation, research institute or national statistics office finds that more than half of a country's adults use such an assistant on a typical day. Figures from the makers count for the rung's "many people", not for this bar.

Who settles it: Nationally representative surveys: Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, national statistics offices; the makers' own user counts only as a floor

Where it stands

In wide use. Reached on 17 June 2026, on the record of pewresearch.org. Could move a stage within 1 to 5 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  No new survey in the window. The bar in the entry's name, more than half of a country's adults on a typical day, is still met nowhere: Pew's survey of 5,119 United States adults, fielded 2026-02-17 to 2026-02-23 and published 2026-06-17, puts daily use at 24 per cent and any use at 49 per cent, and a Goodwater Capital consumer survey gives the same 24 per cent. No Reuters Institute figure for daily use was found.

Notes

Why it is a leaf: the charter's question is how much of a person we can change on purpose, and a mind that routinely thinks with a machine is changed, even if nothing was implanted. The stage is in wide use because the technology is sold to the public everywhere and used by a counted population in the hundreds of millions, which is what the rung asks. The bar in the name, most adults daily, has not been shown by any survey this record could find. The Pew survey linked here, fielded in February 2026, puts the share of American adults who use an AI chatbot at about half, and the share who use one daily at 24 per cent; the Reuters Institute's six-country survey of mid-2025 put weekly use of any such tool at 34 per cent; the maker of the most used assistant said in October 2025 that more than 800 million people used it each week. The entry stays on the tree with the gap stated plainly, and the first representative survey to show a daily majority in any country will be added to the record when it appears.