Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
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Agency
For years, we feared automation would replace humans. But as AI reshapes the economy, it’s becoming clear that far from replacing human ingenuity, AI has amplified it. The critical dividing line in our economy is no longer simply education or specialization, but rather agency itself: the raw determination to make things happen without waiting for... See more
Pirate Wires • Agency Is Eating the World
A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more
Philip Ball • Life With Purpose
So this is what I’ll call a “failure of agency” - a case where there is a clear preference, and a clear ability to act on that preference, but no action occurs (and possibly the idea that you could act never even occurs to you).
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
It’s not that entrepreneurs are natural rule-breakers. Rather … they want self-direction. They aren’t going to take the world at face value. They have to figure it out for themselves.
