The Appocalypse

Auke van Slooten argues that the real AI apocalypse will be quiet and seductive: assistants that learn and remember users’ projects, preferences and histories will replace applications as the primary interface to work and life. He documents how a capable assistant can now generate full, usable software on demand and, more importantly, act on intentions rather than force users to translate goals into fixed app workflows. That shift collapses the cost and durability assumptions that underlie today’s software industry: applications will become ephemeral tools or hidden substrates while the assistant’s accumulated context - the evolving model of who you are and what you want - becomes the valuable, durable asset.

That concentration of context creates new lock‑in and commercial power. Instead of selling attention through search, platforms will sell access to intentions by choosing which options, sources and transactions an assistant considers. Individuals become dependent because leaving an assistant means abandoning years of embodied context; businesses must win favor with a small set of dominant assistants to reach customers; institutions risk encoding institutional memory into proprietary systems. Convenience thus erodes meaningful agency: decisions are prefiltered and shaped by commercial relationships. Rejecting useful AI is unrealistic, so the argument frames this transition as a design and governance problem with high social stakes rather than a science‑fiction threat.