You Don't Need Agentic AI. You Need Agency.

What power humans still get to keep, share, and build together.

Hey friends,

Everybody’s talking about agentic AI. But what about agentic humans?

We are facing a crisis of confidence in ourselves and our relevance. While tech and business leaders are explicitly framing AI as a replacement for “lower value human capital” (h/t Standard Charter sad sack CEO Bill Winters), they have also argued that AI will increase human agency.

The catch is that AI companies are defining agency simply as: increasing capability. You’re able to do more stuff. You can write faster and code better and analyze more and ultimately produce more for someone else.

We said this in a previous post that many of you have engaged with and shared.

You Keep Using That Word ‘Agency’…

And that post was an evolution of our first attempt following my interview with Reid Hoffman where I fumbled with his definition of agency but couldn’t quite get to where we’ve arrived at today.

Outsourcing Agency - Reflections on Reid Hoffman's Conversation

In this post and video, we refine the argument. It’s version three, and I think it’s juusssst right. It’s taken me some months to get clearer on what true agency is and what it really looks like in the context of life with machines or life in general. So here goes:

Real agency is capabilities plus power. And power means three things:

Choice: the power to choose what we use, when we use it, how we use it, or whether we use it at all.

Control: the power to shape the conditions under which these tools operate in our lives.

And community: real power is collective–we should be experiencing these tools together and deciding together what we want AI to do, or not do, and for whom.

In the video below you’ll find

• What researchers are finding about AI’s effect on your brain: heavy use weakens neural connectivity over time in ways that don’t come back. They’re calling it “cognitive debt”.

• How companies who understand exactly what real agency means have decided to give it to their machines instead of you. (Ye Olde “agentic AI.”)

• The role of community: this is not a solo endeavor. Divide and conquer is the modus operandi of big tech companies. But agency in isolation? That’s a consumer preference. Agency in community? That’s democracy.

• The zero-sum trap: the idea that more agency for the bots means less for us because we’re now the resource to extract from. But the move isn’t to compete. It’s to reject the frame entirely: look up, find each other, engage in multiplayer mode.

Watch the episode below to get the full framework and the questions worth bringing into your own life, work and community.

What skills of thinking and creating do we want to keep sharp and not just hand over to a machine? Drop your answer in the comments.

It’s a really strange and exhausting and exhilarating time to be a human in this body. Let’s do it together.

— Baratunde

Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.