Chapter 13
Scoping the Future of Agency
IN THIS CHAPTER
Giving Agentic AI goals, not consciousness
Weighing how AI affects humanity’s self-perception
Working with synthetic and collective intelligence
Predicting the Agentic AI future
Scoping the future of AI agency means looking beyond today’s early Agentic AI experiments and imagining what happens when autonomous, goal-driven systems become deeply woven into the fabric of work, commerce, and society. Agency in this context doesn’t just refer to AI agents acting on their own; it’s about how much independence in actions the agents hold while systems and uses progress. While organizations adopt agentic systems, questions arise about who or what sets the goals for system operations, how to measure outcomes for accuracy and effectiveness, and what guardrails ensure that Agentic AI systems continue to act in alignment with human values. (See Chapter 7 for more information about the topic of alignment.)
This chapter explores the possibilities and tensions that come with giving machines more agency. I offer a look at what a future of distributed ...
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