Human agency

Human transformation

In the age of AI, when machines are able to do many things we have been doing for so long, our goal should be to collectively develop human agency.

Agency is the capacity to act. It is the freedom to choose, to judge, and to change the arrangements you live inside, rather than to be carried along by them. It is not intelligence, and it is not speed. A person with it can take a role, a rule, or a story and see when it no longer fits. A person without it stays inside the part they were handed, however capable they are.

This has never been a private feeling, and it is not a skill one person installs alone. People develop it together: in a mind willing to step out of a category it was given, between people who can change how they live with one another, and in the wider order of work, rank, and institution. Those orders are made by people. What people make, people can remake.

The new tools make that task sharper. A machine can now draft, calculate, remember, and carry through much of what used to fill a working day. Trying to stay faster at those old tasks is the wrong use of the effort. The work is to become more able to act. There is a risk the other way as well. The same machine that takes repetitive work off our hands can sort people into ranks, predict them into the role they already occupy, and make an arrangement feel natural because a system produced it. One use leaves more room to judge and to choose. The other closes that room. The tool does not decide which. People do, and they do it together. One person can guard a little freedom in a day. At the scale of this change, developing human agency is shared work.

AI transformation, beside this page, asks how a firm moves from isolated tools to a different way of working. This page is the other half of that question. It is about the people those systems will sit among: whether a day still feels like something a person does, and whether the orders we build still leave room to move.

Two books, written with Dr. Krishnaswamy Dara, stay with that question. They draw on a long argument about human dignity and the freedom to act, and they bring it into the present. One is a practical case for remaking a life and the arrangements around it, from the mind outward. The other follows how people answered economic change across Asia, and asks what that record offers as another new economy takes shape.