Refine discussion on agentic AI and societal impact

Revised text to enhance clarity and coherence regarding the challenges of understanding agentic AI and its societal implications.

Author: chrisvoncsefalvay

posts/two-years-of-agents/index.qmd

@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ And it's not buying us any semantic clarity, either. It's ultimately an anthropo
 
 ## The widening gyre
 
-What probably worries me more than any of this is the rapidly accelerating divide I am seeing that will fracture our society in ways we are barely beginning to understand. We do not have the vocabulary to reason about true agentic AI. Well-informed, experienced and smart leaders of major global companies are still only starting to get their heads around the profound underlying differences that such systems would entail, and the vast majority of their peers are much further behind. You cannot reason about frontier agentic AI in the language of SDLC, of deterministic governance and prescriptive processes. True frontier agentic AI is something no enterprise in the history of humanity has experienced to any appreciable degree. The top maybe 1% of leaders recognise that they need to fundamentally redraw their approach to doing business. The top 0.1% realise that that's not going to be remotely enough -- they'll need to redraw their own way of thinking, and their organisation's. You cannot treat agentic AI like a new, innovative technology: it is quite literally without a useful analogy from any point in history,^[My favourite analogy for this is Star Wars aliens _vs._ Baxter's Xeeleeverse. Star Wars aliens are all basically mostly humanoids, just weird-looking ones. The Xeeleeverse's aliens aren't even based on the same _physical_ principles, never mind the same biological templates, as we are. The closest to something we understand are the Squeem, who are basically space squid. It only gets weirder from there. Qax are cluster organisms of hexagonal convection cells that need turbulence to survive. The main antagonists, the Photino Birds, are made of antimatter. The Xeelee aren't really described. Even very new and disruptive technology like the internet was alien at best in the way Star Wars aliens are. Agentic AI is Xeeleeverse alien.] and -- even with our valiant efforts -- very few enterprises (and leaders) are at this stage equipped with the organisational and cognitive tools to reason about it, never mind harness it effectively.
+What probably worries me more than any of this is the rapidly accelerating divide I am seeing that will fracture our society in ways we are barely beginning to understand. We do not have the vocabulary to reason about true agentic AI. Well-informed, experienced and smart leaders of major global companies are still only starting to get their heads around the profound underlying differences that such systems would entail, and the vast majority of their peers are much further behind. You cannot reason about frontier agentic AI in the language of SDLC, of deterministic governance and prescriptive processes. True frontier agentic AI is something no enterprise in the history of humanity has experienced to any appreciable degree. The top maybe 1% of leaders recognise that they need to fundamentally redraw their approach to doing business. The top 0.1% realise that that's not going to be remotely enough -- they'll need to redraw their own way of thinking, and their organisation's. You cannot treat agentic AI like a new, innovative technology: it is quite literally without a useful analogy from any point in history,^[My favourite analogy for this is Star Wars aliens _vs._ Baxter's Xeeleeverse. Star Wars aliens are all basically mostly humanoids, just weird-looking ones. The Xeeleeverse's aliens aren't even based on the same _physical_ principles, never mind the same biological templates, as we are. The closest to something we understand are the Squeem, who are basically space squid. It only gets weirder from there. Qax are cluster organisms of hexagonal convection cells that need turbulence to survive. The main antagonists, the Photino Birds, are made of antimatter. The Xeelee aren't really described. Even very new and disruptive technology like the internet was alien at best in the way Star Wars aliens are. Agentic AI is Xeeleeverse alien.] and -- even with our valiant efforts -- very few enterprises (and leaders) are at this stage equipped with the organisational and cognitive tools to reason about it, never mind harness it effectively. A good deal of my job is to create ans convey those tools, and help them navigate this new stormy sea. But even for such decision-makers -- whom I collectively consider perhaps the most agile collection of minds bar none that I ever had the privilege to meet --, the conceptual chasm created by this new pradigm is significant.
 
 At some point a few hundred thousand years ago, a gene called FOXP2 underwent a mutation in our early ancestors. We don't really understand what FOXP2 does. The simplistic explanation is that it has to do with language, the better explanation is that it's a motor learning gene that is necessary for effective language acquisition. In either case, it has been one of the greatest and most rapid success stories of evolution, essentially sweeping away wild-type FOXP2 in what in evolutionary terms is a blink of an eye. The evolutionary edge that language ability and speech conferred on our ancestors was so vast that it essentially eliminated the non-speakers. Society, coordination, story, culture, law, lore, history -- we owe almost all our organising principles, from the smallest scale of two hunters planning a way to encircle their prey to the largest scale of social coordinated communication like elections or participatory democracy, to our ability to communicate.