Ai Agents Are Here - But Are They Thinking For Us Or Replacing Us?

But building AI that needs little prompting raises uncomfortable questions about where humans will fit into, well, everything in the next decade, as our cognitive labour gets automated away from our work.

Reid Hoffman has spent the last few years banging the drum on AI's positive effects. The co-founder of LinkedIn, Microsoft board member and partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners has published a book arguing that as AI systems gain greater abilities, they will enhance human agency - hence its title: Superagency .

Partly, this is a response to unease about how AI looks likely to erode our critical thinking skills and "agency" itself, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as the capacity to exert power. "For every major general-purpose technology, this worry comes up," Hoffman says in an interview. "A lot of the discourse around the printing press was very similar to the discourse around AI, which is, it'll reduce human cognitive capabilities."

He argues that skills we do lose - like the ability to recite Homeric poems - are a price worth paying for all the extra things AI will allow us to do. Chatbots can talk people out of attempting suicide, he says.

That could become a problem as AI agents become more integrated with white-collar work - particularly if they're designed to sound more like a knowledgeable human than a machine with limits. One view of the future held by those like Hoffman is that professionals in areas like finance, law and media will take on more of a role overseeing these agents, which will do more of the work humans accomplish today.