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Such a great point "When we think of the current moment we have to remember why so many people in power want to constrict our agency ... If our efforts were like a child playing with a toy cellphone, pressing buttons that lead to no outcomes, there would be no reason to take them away."
Okay I read this now and I want to thank you for writing it. It hurts to read but also rings true. One of the things that bugs me most is that the people (or agents) in power make decisions quickly and easily, while our carefulness gives us less agency in the world. Hard to reconcile.
Thanks! Yea it feels related to the idea that there are no ethical billionaires. You just don't get to that kind of power if morality was a major part of your decision making
Thanks for sharing, Grace. Totally agree with your last statement that, "... we need 2025 to be the year not of agentic AI but of agentic humans ..." Especially when 2025 has just begun, we should take this time to reflect and decide the journey we want to pursue in 2025!
This! So much this. I'm reminded of the ideas dear to me – yet that I too easily forget – of Sartre and Beauvoir. If we do not actively reaffirm our capability for agency, we will be absorbed into the systems that erode and negate human freedom, and complicit in them. Truer than ever, now as in 1939
I feel this as an AI-adjacent researcher, too. Walking the poster halls of NeuRIPS, where amid the push to "replicate human capabilities" is our individual human agency? It only seems diminished, soaking in a bath of algorithmically generated content
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We live “no ordinary times” and while terrifying it’s an opportunity to show some character.