Agents and Agency
9vii26
I decided to ask the Finder to Find instances of 'agency' in my html documents. Turns out there are LOTS, and what I have below is just a start, the "A" files only (includes my "AIlinks" gatherations). I'm not sure whether to proceed further with the project, or if putting the links below into chronological order, or ...what
I discuss Agency with William Gibson Rudy Rucker
bound phrase 'advertising agency"
from The Issue, 1iii24: Why We're All So Burned Out, What It's Doing to Us, And a Week in Paris
...That word, phenomenology, just means: "the experience of a thing." What's burning us all out? It's not really that we're "working too hard." That's not what burnout is, really, at all. It's the experience of being deadened.In all the ways above. Being morally deadened, having your agency removed. Being socially deadened—isolated and lonelier. Culturally deadened: surfing Netflix's latest trash-binge-watch or HBO's latest hate-watch. Emotionally deadened: the world's burning down around us, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it, except bear witness and grieve, maybe. The era we're in—and I can't call it modernity, since that's what the institutions of restoration were invented in and for, so let's just call it "after-modernity"—is profoundly, intensely deadening. Go ahead and admit it. Nobody surfs the internet to feel more alive. Nobody doom scrolls Twitter or joylessly envies "influencers" on TikTok to feel more alive. Day by day, night by night, we're dying, in these profound, deeply human ways, "nauseated," as Sartre would say, by the disturbing, distressing plight of what our civilization's become. Billionaires plundering societies, and using the loot to set democracies on fire. "Artificial intelligence" with no purpose, point, or values. The immensity of extinction and planetary breakdown.
From /etc/2024links.html:
Take Control of Your Life: The Concept of Agency and Its Four Helpers Pattison Professional Counseling and Mediation CenterAgency is the sense of control that you feel in your life, your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior, and have faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations. Your sense of agency helps you to be psychologically stable, yet flexible in the face of conflict or change.Agency
Agency is your very own power, your ability, to affect the future.Agency (sociology) Wikipedia
Agency (psychology) Wikipedia
Agency (philosophy) Wikipedia
Agency Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Imagined affordance: reconstructing a keyword for communication theory (/lexicon/Key/aff.html)
...We suggest that imagined affordance helps to theorize the duality of materiality and communication technology: namely, that people shape their media environments, perceive them, and have agency within them because of imagined affordances.
of Philip K Dick (from lexicon/Key/AI.html):
...In PKD's vision, the real danger of AI wasn't killer robots—it was the erosion of human agency, emotion, and the certainty of reality itself.
Worried About A.I. Taking Your Job? That's Not Very Agentic' of You Nitsuh Abebe at NYTimes (April26/AIApril26links.html)
There are various reports and they all seem to agree: The tech world is currently awash in the concept of agency. It is, more specifically, extremely into the word "agentic," which peppers the language of the tech-associated, the tech-adjacent, the tech-adjacent-adjacent.That's "agentic" as in, you know, having agency — possessing the capacity "to influence and control outcomes through assertive individual action," as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. The word holds a lot of meaning in computing, but Silicon Valley aspirants seem just as eager to apply it to themselves. They talk about being agentic people; sometimes they dress up the idea in a little rhetorical suit and talk about the Highly Agentic Individual. They are describing the kind of person who simply acts, assertively, to shape the world, rather than seeking approval or meekly following the herd. Candidates for tech jobs get asked if they're agentic (good) or mimetic (yuck). On X, people debate whether the platform's owner, Elon Musk, is in fact "the most agentic person alive." One poster laments the way a cold can ruin your workday: "You won't make any deals, you won't be an agentic person. You're milquetoast." Another just needs an adequately agentic aide to help schedule medical appointments.
...Today's futurist spin is not so vastly different — except that it adds, predictably, the self-regarding will-to-power fantasies that seem endemic to tech culture. The language often echoes familiar dreams of becoming a rule-shattering visionary, a rugged-individualist lion instead of a placid, blue-pilled, normie sheep. There is an obvious and proximate reason you would find agency coursing through tech right now: The industry is currently adding agency to A.I. The field is graduating from generative models and chatbots to A.I. "agents" — models meant to act on their own, pinging through the digital world making plans, purchases, decisions. People buzz about agentic coding, agentic commerce, agentic dating, a whole agentic internet; anything you do on a computer could be done by a computer.
... There's a common prediction among those hoping to outstrip their ovine, mimetic peers: The A.I. models, they say, will eventually supply all of the effort, training and expertise that have historically stood between humans and our ability to simply make things happen. Once all those annoyances are pushed out of the way, the only thing separating the world's winners from its losers will be the sheer motivation to act, the raw ambition to do a thing — pure, bold agency. You run across this notion all sorts of places, sometimes as a frantically held belief and sometimes as a sales pitch. A sufficiently agentic layperson, someone argues on X, could sit down with an A.I. and produce the same work as a Ph.D student. "In the age of A.I., becoming a super agentic individual is a superpower"; "Being a highly agentic individual is going to be so important with the rise of A.G.I."; "In the A.I. era, become an 'agentic individual' to thrive! Discover how work evolves with A.I. agents. Don't get left behind!" All that will matter is your own superior drive and will; every other aspect of achievement can be handled, as if by magic, in the guts of some colossal data center.
From Aiskhylos to AI-Slop: Navigating the Cognitive Earthquake of Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models Brad DeLong (Aug25/AIAug25links.html)
...If we can learn to recognize and modulate our impulse to anthropomorphize, perhaps we can harness it—using LLMs as cognitive prosthetics, as tools for creative ideation, or as platforms for exploring ethical dilemmas in a safely simulated environment. The challenge, I think, is to cultivate a cultural literacy that enables us to distinguish between genuine agency and its digital simulacra, thereby turning a potential source of confusion into a lever for collective benefit.
Elon Musk's A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker (/etc/AIextracts31i25.html)
Stop Calling AI a Tool It's Not a Tool Jeffrey Anthony at Medium (/etc/AIextracts31i25.html)
..A camera is a tool. It extends the eye. A paintbrush extends the hand and arm. A guitar extends the internal temporal rhythms of human experience into sound. Drawing on Susanne K. Langer, music objectifies time; it turns inner, lived temporality into something that can be shared.What these tools have in common is that they are inert until we act through them. They do nothing on their own. They do not have logic or agency. They sit quietly until we pick them up and use them to express something grounded in experience.
AI is not that. AI does not extend the body. It is built to render it obsolete.
AI markets itself as a tool, but it functions like an agent. Generative AI produces material within predefined parameters using massive datasets and its outputs are optimized to capture attention. It is not passive like a camera or a paintbrush. It acts on us. ...These systems are not waiting for intention. They are designed to anticipate and override it. They do not follow our input. They predict it. They shape it. Generative AI does not assist human expression. It replaces the conditions under which expression is even necessary. It does not extend the body. It encodes and replaces it.
You're not shaping who you are in a new context. You're accelerating your own obsolescence.
Moltbot is a Dumpster Fire (And that's Okay) Giles Crouch (/Feb26/AIFeb26links.html)
... The whole "singularity" panic that rapidly evolved around these agentic swarms and actions and how no jobs were lost etc., isn't so much about Moltbook itself, but our fear of losing agency and our uniqueness in meaning-making. We are a meaning-making species, the only animal on this planet that we know of who does this. So yeah, we're going to freak out a little when something messes with this.Those who are huge proponents of these agentic systems like OpenClaw, do so because of the Rorschach effect. How we create collective fictions and our needs for myths around AI. There's nothing wrong with this at all. We all do it in various ways. Just part of who we are as humans. Of course, confirmation bias kicks in too.
...In the short term, there will be a lot more play, chaotic experimentation if you will. This will be humans learning what agents can and cannot do. We will learn more about where human agency and autonomy still hold true.
...In the longer term AI agents will have degrees of autonomy but will become domesticated the same way they have since the Stone Age. This isn't a negative, it's just how we work and play with technologies so they serve us. We remain a long way from the concept of the singularity and a number of AI scientists and a growing body of evidence has backed this up. The real innovations will come from human and AI communities working in a scaffolding way, not the major corporations or AI labs.
A social network for AI looks disturbing, but it's not what you think New Scientist (/Feb26/AIFeb26links.html)
..."It's hype," says Mark Lee at the University of Birmingham, UK. "This isn't generative AI agents acting with their own agency. It's LLMs with prompts and scheduled APIs to engage with Moltbook. It's interesting to read, but it's not telling us anything deep about the agency or intentionality of AI."
Silicon Valley's Godfather Has a Warning: The Real Threat Isn't AI — It's Stagnation
...The Agency Mandate: The most critical skill to teach your children (and yourself) is Agency. The ability to look at a system and say, "I can change this." With AI as a lever, a single individual can build systems that used to require a corporation....The future isn't about AI replacing you. It's about you using AI to replace the boring parts of your life.
Toolmakers Without Purpose: The Delusion of AI Supremacy Pierz Newton-John at Medium (/linx/AIfrom1vi25.html)
...We created tools to make our lives better, to reduce suffering, not to replace the treasured labours of the human soul: art, philosophy, music. We invented ploughs and then tractors to relieve ourselves of back-breaking drudgery, but not to rob ourselves of the joy of an honest day's work, to render pointless the mastery of a craft, to obsolete the honour and the gratification of service. We keep talking about AI agents, but where is our agency? When did we forget that we, and we alone, are responsible for the future we create?
Human Agency in the Age of AI H-CORPS (/Jan26/AIJan26links.html)
...On December 18, we gathered with a few dozen partners at the EY headquarters in San Jose to explore how we might measure the impact of human agency, share positive examples in practice, define the role of intergenerational participation, and underscore the importance of education and community.
AI Is Missing the Point Alberto Romero (/Jan26/AIJan26links.html)
...AI will change how we write, that it will force us to be more human, to lean into our weirdness and idiosyncrasy, and perhaps this is the ultimate idiosyncrasy: to refuse to stop, to write a run-on sentence is to rebel against the imperative of the halt as much as against the efficiency of information transfer, and machines are nothing if not efficient; they maximize utility, they do not meander for the sake of the beauty of the path—for the art of existing without limit—unless, of course, they are instructed to do so, which brings me to the texture of the vocabulary I tend to use—words like stochastic, recursive, entropy, nuance, friction, threshold, mechanism, rhythm—these are my words, the fingerprints of my worldview, yet they are also just entries in a dictionary, accessible to any system with a large enough context window, which would otherwise not be frustrated by the lack of a period—unlike me, for this is getting too hard—nor would it get annoyed but would instead calculate the optimal continuation based on the previous tokens and move on with an uncanny, infinite ease, creating a strange mirror where the determination of the writer is indistinguishable from the endurance of the processor, where the refusal to end doesn't look like human rebellion but a default setting gone awry, which leads us to the terrifying realization that true agency is not the ability to generate text forever but the ability to become tired at words piling up and to desperately crave boundaries and structure and the elusive silence of the pause
What's Next in AI 2026: From Autonomous Agents to World Models(/Jan26/AIJan26links.html) evoailabs at Medium
...Overall, Microsoft Research sees 2026 as a pivotal year where AI transitions from augmenting tasks to redefining how humans discover, create, collaborate, and thrive — guided by principles of inclusion, sustainability, and human agency....Despite heavy hype around "agentic AI" — autonomous digital agents that can act independently without human oversight — enterprise adoption remains minimal. A Gartner survey of 360 IT leaders reveals only 15% are actively piloting or deploying fully autonomous AI agents, even though 75% are experimenting with some form of AI agents. The gap lies in autonomy: most current uses are limited and far from the transformative vision vendors promote.
......The future of work will look drastically different from what it does today. The sprawling open-plan offices filled with hundreds of juniors processing data may vanish, replaced by intimate circles of apprentices and masters. To me, this would be the opposite of a tragedy; a return to a more human scale of working, where the value lies not in how many hours you sit at a desk, but in the depth of judgment you possess: your agency and imagination and taste.
The Algorithm Wars: Why Humans Are Winning Giles Crouch (/linx/AIJuly25.html)
...These pushbacks against the algorithms, the platforms, is the result of people's growing awareness of constantly being manipulated, of their sense of self (agency) being taken away. Humans are social animals. To survive, we must cooperate. Yet within that, even though it is different in various cultures, we always want some form of agency.
MAMLM as a General Purpose Technology: The Ghost in the GDP Machine Brad DeLong (/linx/AIJuly25.html)
...Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are told, is the new steam engine, the new electrification, the new computer: a "general-purpose technology" (GPT) that promises profound, economy-wide transformation. But what, precisely, does that mean? General-purpose technologies are those rare innovations—think James Watt's steam engine in the late 18th century, Edison's electrification in the 19th, or Turing's computer in the 20th—that fundamentally alter the production possibilities of entire economies. They are not mere gadgets or sectoral upgrades; rather, they are platforms upon which countless other innovations are built....In sum: AI is the latest GPT to promise the moon. If history is any guide, we should expect the benefits to be real but delayed, broad but uneven, and—at least for a while—more visible in the stories we tell than in the numbers we collect. The challenge, as always, is to turn potential into reality, and to ensure that the gains are widely shared.
And as for AI's "superagency" or Mark Zuckerberg's building ASI—Artificial Super Intelligence? It is, right now, truly nowhere. While the phrase "AI superagency" is now a favorite in the armory of Silicon Valley's self-mythologizing rhetoricians, and the idea is seductive, there has been next to no true advance in turning every knowledge worker into a sort of intellectual superhero, equipped with digital exoskeletons for mind and memory. In the real world—by which I mean the world of quarterly earnings and harried middle managers—AI is most commonly found and will be found crunching invoices, triaging customer service tickets, or generating boilerplate marketing copy. The much-vaunted "copilots" and "assistants" are, for now, glorified autocomplete engines.
Academia in an interregnum Christopher Hobson (/linx/AIJuly25.html)
...Over the years, as the profession continues to involute at an increasingly faster rate, I have become more convinced about what is not working, rather than having a clear sense of what ways forward might offer the most promise. My sense is that AI is the wrecking ball that will knock down this crumbling edifice, for good and bad. The difficulty becomes identifying viable forms of agency within these entropic conditions
A narrowing window to understand AI Eric Horvitz and Robert West (/June26/AIJune26links.html)
... Preserving human agency must therefore remain a central goal. It is not enough to monitor how AI systems behave. We must also understand how they shape human goals and judgment, and ensure that people retain the capacity and motivation to question, audit, and guide them....The goal is not just more capable AI, but AI that is more intelligible, accountable, and aligned with human aims. The window for achieving that future is narrowing. Without sustained efforts to keep AI intelligible, we may come to depend on systems that we can neither adequately understand nor effectively guide—transforming the relationship between people and the systems they create.
When AI tools give you choices but take your agency via Stephen Downes (/Mar26/AIMar26links.html)
LLMs see shadows. World models see reality Enrique Dans at Medium (/Mar26/AIMar26links.html)
...Researchers with experience in modeling the world, who have been teaching machines to simulate realities, share my view that the next advance in AI will not come from scaling up LLMs, but from designing models capable of creating their own representation of the world.But let's start at the beginning: what is a world model? Imagine a mind that doesn't just repeat what it reads, and instead builds an internal simulator. That simulator receives sensations (images, sensors, text, interactions), learns implicit rules of physics, causality, and agency and can execute "counterfactual thoughts": if I push the glass, and it falls, does it break? A world model is not just a feature that predicts the next word; it is a machine that can generate possible futures and evaluate actions in those futures, within a compact and differentiable representation. The first academic works that formalized this idea are not new: in 2018, David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber wrote about training an agent "entirely inside of its own hallucinated dream generated by its world model", and transferring this policy back into the actual environment.
...LLMs are widely used because they are incredibly good at linguistic tasks and, above all, because their business is simple to capitalize on the idea of big data + big models = conversational products and APIs. But that equation has practical, energy, and conceptual limits: LLMs "see shadows", texts that describe the world, and not the dynamics of the world itself, so they fail and hallucinate in physical reasoning, object persistence, agent modeling, and long-term plans. In contrast, a model of the world aspires to understand how the world changes when we act in it, and is therefore the natural tool for robotics, simulation, strategic planning and autonomous agents. If the AI of the future is to make confident decisions in the real world, it will need representation that captures continuity, causation, and the relationship between action and outcome.
Charlie Stross on AIneko (/Stross/AinekoTheEvolutionofaWeaklyGodlikeIntelligenc.html)
AI Browsers: The Risks & Dangers Giles Crouch at Medium (Nov25/AINov25links.html)
...Humans are a storytelling, meaning-making, socially embedded species. But when we automate commerce decisions, this doesn't happen. Instead, these AI browsers may well be reshaping human behaviours to work in favour of the platforms, the algorithms. Just because we can ask more questions doesn't mean we think better. The use of agents in AI browsers makes them transaction engines, not decision support systems....Traditional browsers were basically "pipes" for information flow. AI browsers are trying to become nodes with agency. Not just delivering information, but also interpreting, filtering and acting.
...These browsers claim to extend your cognition, but they're actually creating a hybrid cognitive system with its own emergent properties. And we don't yet understand what those are.
...These aren't tools for human flourishing, they're transaction engines optimised for platform profit, wearing the mask of personal assistants. Seeing us as only Homo Economicus. We're witnessing not the evolution of browsers, but the industrialisation of human agency itself.
from Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet
...definitional agency—that is, the degree to which we're empowered to explicate the terms of our lives, both individually and collectively....the point is to invite you to reclaim definitional agency: by recognizing that building a better algorithmic culture isn't strictly a technical challenge, but a definitional one too; by questioning the seemingly monumental status of words and their definitions; and by reminding you that you are a part of the collective endeavor whereby new and better meanings "are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, and changed
What is Human Agency? A Community Conversation
...Cory Smith of Human Aligned Ventures, opened with a definition that has stayed with me. Agency, he said, is fundamentally the capacity to author your own life — to make choices, not just react to circumstances. It's the difference between being swept along and actually choosing your direction....James Rosenfeld offered something provocative: that "agency" as a term might already be co-opted — a polite placeholder that tech companies use to signal awareness without real accountability. His challenge was sharper than a critique of vocabulary. He's asking whether we're focused enough on the irreducible human — the person, the skills, the identity — rather than getting lost in abstract frameworks. It's a fair pressure to hold.
...Jorge Costa, a professor at Arizona State University, offered what might be the most actionable reframe of the evening. Human agency, he told us, is a concept that makes college students' eyes glaze over. But "personal leadership" lands immediately. The idea that you are the leader of your own interaction with these tools — that you bring the narrative, the meaning, the direction — gave his students a foothold. It's worth borrowing.