Why does agency matter?

Their wordsI can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.

Their wordsThe difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.

Their wordsIt was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.

Their wordsI think like in startups the term is agency. Like somebody who's high agency who's just going to get things done, who's never going to like say no to something. I think like that attitude is really important of like okay, if I don't know something, I'll just learn it.

Their wordsI saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.

Their wordsWelcome to the era of AI-native companies, where individual contributors (ICs) reign supreme.

Their wordsMost subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.

Their wordsBurnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening.

Their wordswe believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an expander of their own agency.

Their wordsthere's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety.

Their wordsif every year people have more freedom and agency to spend more of their time doing the stuff they want to do and they feel like the quality of life and the quality of their time is going up year after year, we'll probably be mostly okay.

Their wordsHuman agency, the willingness to push, experiment and act without waiting for instructions, seems increasingly important to getting value out of AI

Their wordsmaking intelligence cheap does not automatically make “agency” cheap. people are constrained by time, money, confidence, health, education, institutions, family, geography; a model does not magic any of that away. there’s a perfectly believable future where these tools mostly compound the advantage of people who already have the skill, taste, money and the spare time to use them well.

Their wordsThe absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools. So doom scrolling, passive watching of shorts, all this are not helping agency, human agency.