The last human bastion is agency

Agency (in the context of making decisions) is the most important skill during the AI era.

I believe computers (robots/AI/agents) can do almost all human work. We can automate every task but not decisions.

Making decisions requires willpower (see Baumeister et. al.), but only humans have it.

Computers can help with decisions, but they can’t make them. They can find arguments for different options, compare them. They can also create and run models to understand consequences, but they can’t take responsibility for them.

Organize and delegate, not just replace yourself

I watch in horror as people around me use AI in an absolutely unsafe way.

People give full access to their devices. The AI tools can use browsers (with all accounts), SMS, emails, bank apps. Once I saw somebody allow AI to attach by SSH to a production server! And nobody sees the problem with this.

What is the problem? You give control of all your digital life to someone else. He can send the wrong email to your boss (from your name!), he can spend all of your money. And you can’t control this.

Everything should be written

I’m building a habit of writing down everything. I think this is the base of efficient work.

Any thought should be written down. Any bookmark, any interesting book, any link, any quote, any paper should be saved. Everything interesting. But I should save only things which I am really interested in, not all of them. This is important.

Ideas don’t appear out of thin air. They are born from other ideas (mine or other people’s, but already written down). If so, they should be linked. I can track how my ideas grow and find insights there.

Andy Smith

The last human bastion is agency

Organize and delegate, not just replace yourself

Everything should be written

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