Routes of Fate, Paths of Will

What really is agency, anyway?

Once upon a time, I had a long route to drive my daughter to school.

Google Maps said it would take 18 minutes to drive her there in the mornings.

And the funny thing about this is that if I followed the recommended routes of any map apps, they were right. 18 minutes even.

There was a point that I discovered I could cut this drive down to 12 minutes, though.

The map apps optimized for using bigger main roads, usually with traffic lights, making the drive easier or safer on otherwise hard left turns or crossroads.

The problem with this is that these kind of routes remove agency. Your fate is determined by the timing of the lights and the conditions of the busiest roads at rush hour.

The key change I made was finding a route that optimized for giving me more choice and freedom of movement. Really, what this boiled down to was finding a path with the fewest traffic lights possible.

The app-given route had 14 traffic lights on 7 miles. I found that optimizing for backroads and alternative paths with more stop signs afforded much more flexibility of movement, with the hardest part being crossing busy multi-lane roads without a traffic light.

This new path added a mile, but shaved off a third of the time by reducing the number of traffic lights in half to only 7.

I think this is an important analogy for our lives in general. How much of our days are handed down by some somewhat mindless guidance system, optimizing for things that don’t necessarily align with our own values, preferences, or risk tolerances?

Where could we be more nimble? Are there any paths we could be taking that, with a little more will and courage, could actually bring us to our goals faster, even while seeming like a longer, harder, or riskier path? Are there little moments where we could exercise a little more agility both mentally and physically throughout our day to bring us closer to where we want to be?

Anyway, I guess the reason I feel this is so important is because something that keeps being discussed more and more amongst those in AI circles is the concept of personal agency. But what is agency anyway?

At its core, agency is about recognizing yourself as the primary author of your life story, not merely a character responding to external forces. It’s the power to intentionally shape your life through deliberate choices and actions, rather than being passively directed by circumstances or other people.

Futurists seem confident that highly agentic people are likely to own the future, and part of the reason for this is that agentic people will rapidly recognize AI tools as an accessible ladder for them to climb to reach their goals.

The other half of this is that AI agents themselves are coming. These are AI tools that effectively act like employees. You give it the task, and it goes off to do your bidding. It doesn’t stop at just one agent though; you may have a dozen agents each doing different kinds of work and collaborating.

Naturally, this is the kind of thing that lends itself to executive-style thinking. Someone with lofty goals and the ability to manage dozens of agents or employees at once on different tasks will likely go much further than someone who has never managed before at all. The barrier to exerting one’s will upon the world will become lower than ever, so having a lot of will to begin with will carry you leaps and bounds.

There is also the next question of what things look like when an AI agent becomes smart enough to run a company of agents autonomously. I won’t comment for now, but I still suspect that having personal agency as a human will have a lot of value even in that world.