The last few decades have been about capturing attention. Companies built free products, captured our attention and sold it to advertisers. The choices we made about what to buy and who to like were shaped by what they showed us.
The next few decades will be about capturing choices. We call it automating work when AI makes decisions for us. When it writes the email, designs the brand, picks who to hire. As AI makes choices for us, it is forming an agency economy. The impact this will have on us cannot be overstated. Human agency is the capacity to consciously direct our actions in alignment with our values, intentions and understanding rather than being driven by external forces, unconscious conditioning and automatic impulse. Our agency is our ability to claim this action came from “me”.
Today, the race among hyperscalers is to become the dominant standard in AI. We are currently enjoying a golden era as consumers of this technology, heavily subsidized by investors while its underlying business models remain nascent. As the AI economy settles in, sustainable and profitable models will emerge. The inertia from the attention economy will bring business models that orchestrate the external forces, unconscious conditioning and automatic impulses that decrease our agency. Coupled with AI, this economic model threatens to eliminate our agency entirely as it will become the margin of opportunity for companies. If that happens, we will have lost our humanity. We will have become a cultivated species, optimized and harvested by the systems we built.
Yet there is another future made possible with AI. One that integrates this technology into an economic system designed to increase human agency. Instead of cultivating us as a species, it cultivates our potential as humans. This economy is grounded in a single principle. Each human has a unique fingerprint of attributes that can be actualized through coherent choices, and made valuable to other humans.
We can optimize for human agency by optimizing for coherence. Coherence is the measurable alignment between our choices and our values, intentions and understanding. This does not mean a future without an attention economy or a world that functions in a silo from the harsh conditions influencing us. It means another economy, built to optimize for coherence in the face of the external forces, unconscious conditioning and automatic impulses that have shaped the last twenty years.
The battle for human agency will be decided in the interpretation layer between measurement and influence. Measurement is commoditizing. We have reached an abundance of mechanisms to read our bodies, model our behaviors and predict our desires. Influence is where the moral question lives, where the incentives of the systems we build determine which choices we are presented with. Interpretation is where who we are and what we value becomes meaning a machine can act on. Your heart rate climbs and a system decides whether that means excitement, fear or a flight of stairs. Your voice inflects and a system decides your chemistry with another person. Your location changes and a system decides whether that’s a good environment for you. Whoever controls that layer controls the choice architecture shaping our human agency.
We are building a future to increase our human agency. This frontier requires an ecosystem at the earliest stages of economic formation. It requires capital, founders, and a multidisciplinary community of thought leaders. And it requires a language and a lens to organize the world in ways that measure and impact the forces determining our agency.
The defining question of the next century is whether human beings will remain authors of their own choices. Our future is being determined on the frontier of today. As Winston Churchill said, the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. The battle for our agency has begun and the time for you to join is now.
I wish more leaders would reflect this deep and not just hunt profits