Agency

Humans have agency.

From what I’ve seen so far, I’m not convinced that AI agents have agency.

AI agents need to be programmed. They follow a very specific set of steps that need to be defined by humans.

While this may change in the future, I think now is the time for humans to initiate AI action. Humans have needs and wants. For example, humans NEED to eat. We WANT to do meaningful work.

How can AI help? Humans can develop AI agents to assist with food distribution (for example). Humans can develop AI agents to handle routine tasks, allowing us to spend more time on meaningful work.

Do we want AI to have agency? I’m not convinced.

If AI is given the ability to WANT to initiate wars, and if AI could create AI agents to handle the minutiae of actually going to war, humans could be in trouble. We don’t need movies like The Terminator to understand why!

I don’t want future Drone attacks to be initiated by AI. I want a human-in-the-loop (HITL)! Anthropic and the Pentagon are at odds regarding this issue at the moment.

Do we want humans to have more agency? Yes!

Humans should consider leveraging AI for some of the specific things that it does well. Will software developers be needed in the future? (Note: AI can already be used to improve programmer efficiency.) I’m not sure.

Claude AI is promoted as a “problem solver”. Microsoft’s Copilot is promoted as an “AI assistant”. Some humans are learning to use these tools as effectively as I learned how to use a calculator while doing physics back in the year 1990.

Can AI help increase human agency? Perhaps. Again, I’m not sure.

At this point, AI is unable to ACT without human initiative. If humans KNOW what they want, they can use AI to help them along the way. The problem is that most humans don’t really know what they want.

We tend to be very clear about some of our desires and much less so about others. In my case, I have many competing priorities. While I can use AI to help me accomplish some tasks, I’m not able to focus on ALL of my interests at the same time.

Somehow, I don’t think this is a problem AI can solve in the near future.