The Goal Is to Develop Human Agency
In the age of AI, when machines can do so much of what we have long done, the goal is to collectively develop human agency.
Human agency
The Goal Is to Develop Human Agency
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.
A machine can draft, calculate, remember, and carry a task through. Much of what filled a working day can now be handed over. That is a real change, and it is easy to meet it in the wrong way: by trying to stay faster at the old tasks, or by treating the machine as a fate that arrives and leaves people with less to do. Neither is the goal. The goal is agency. Agency is the capacity to act — to choose, to judge, and to remake the arrangements you live inside — rather than to be carried along by them.
It is not a private feeling, and it is not a skill you install alone. People develop it together: in a mind that can step out of the role it was handed, between people who can change how they live with one another, and in the wider order of work, rank, and rule. When the tools can do so much of what we used to do, that shared capacity is the work that is left.
The notes and books gathered on Human transformation are about that work. The writing on the home page asks how a firm uses agents. These ask how people stay able to act.