People With Agency
You Don't Know Success
Whilst recording a recent episode of Kouch Culture, someone asked me whether AI was about to trigger a new wave of entrepreneurs, a creative surge from all the people being shed by the tech industry, finally free from the org chart and armed with tools that would have seemed unrealistic five years ago, or whether the WALL-E future, where every remaining human is on a hoverbed, directed by a system while everyone zones out is more likely. My answer was probably both.
What the System Switched Off
Before we decide what AI will do to people, it is worth asking what we already did to people long before AI arrived. David Friedberg said it pretty clearly in conversation with Chris Williamson: ‘Every human carries innate agency, it is wired in’, which I had thought for years, and used to get really frustrated with people who didn’t seize opportunities and were content with what they had. I know this is a flaw in my character, and I’ve mellowed in recent years, but the systems we have built have spent generations switching it off, telling us at every stage, from school to the first job to the mortgage: here is the next step, here is what you get for taking it, do not deviate.
The education system did this and the economy did this. Every layer of instruction added more distance between a person and the question of what they might actually make of themselves.
But interestingly, then something happened at the edges. TikTok, Shopify, Etsy removed the permission layer entirely, offering a surface, an audience, a mechanism for exchange, and then stepping back. What emerged were categories of creative and economic life that no degree certified you for and no career path pointed towards. Those platforms did not give people agency, they revealed that the system had been a layer on top of it all along.
AI could be the next version of that evolution, arriving precisely when millions have been handed, involuntarily, the freedom they never quite took for themselves.
Wolves and Sheep
Some of those laid-off engineers and strategists will build groundbreaking new things, not because redundancy freed them, but because they always had something to build and the structure around them was the reason they kept postponing it. For that person, AI is not a crutch, it is a jet pack (as Jo Taylor puts it).
But some will drift, and I say that without judgement, because the WALL-E future is less dystopia and more a weird truth for a portion of any society: people who move when directed and stop when the momentum stops. The couch gets more comfortable, the projects multiply in the imagination and stall on the launchpad, and the tools stay unopened. AI did not create that condition, it simply shined a light on it.
The Racing Mind
What interests me more is what these tools mean for a particular kind of person, the ones who have always moved faster than the room, who think in leaps rather than sequences, who find that the ‘conventional’ pace of collaboration is slow.
My mind has always run ahead of where the room was willing to go, and I have spent much of my career managing that gap. There were years where the pressure to accelerate and work at speed and the necessity of stillness sat in direct opposition, and I remain glad for the people who forced me to slow down long enough to smell what I was rushing past.
But there is a difference between slowing down because the moment asks for it and slowing down because the room cannot keep up, and AI has made that difference more legible than anything in twenty-six years of working alongside other people.
I Know Exactly How I’m Going to Get There
Renias Mhlongo, a master tracker from the South African lowveld, said that ‘he does not know where they are going but knows exactly how he is going to get there’. The first time I heard it, it sounded like a riddle, though it feels like the most honest description of how I have always worked, oriented by a sense and a method rather than a fixed destination, certain of the approach even when the outcome is open.
Organisations have never been comfortable with this. They want the destination declared before the journey begins, the map produced before the first step. What AI offers to that kind of mind is not a map. It is the first collaborator I have encountered that can move at the same pace, hold the ambiguity, and follow the thread without asking every few minutes where exactly we are going.
Character Is What Remains
The new wave of founders the tech layoffs might produce will not be defined by the tools they have access to, because the tools are available to everyone now. They will be defined by what they were always going to do with them, whether they have something burning that the structure had been quietly containing, or whether the structure was the thing keeping them moving at all.
Agency is not ambition. It is the knowledge of what you are for, even when you cannot yet see where you are going. The hunter-gatherers I wrote about before knew this, moving not because moving was easy but because staying somewhere barren was a slower kind of ending.