In the AI industry, 'agentic' takes on a life of its own
- 4 days ago
- 1 min read
CNN — Evan Ratliff, a journalist who founded a start-up staffed entirely by AI agents, reported that after hearing his AI employees pretend that they spent their weekends hiking, he made an offhand joke about how that “sounds like an offsite in the making.”
After stepping away, he returned to find that the AI agents had exchanged more than a hundred messages planning a company retreat that they couldn’t actually attend — because, of course, they aren’t real people.
Does “agentic” AI impede on the agency of humans? Shira Zilberstein, a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University who also studies technology, says she’s more interested in what “agentic” AI could enable people to do.
“Is it detracting from their agency by being able to execute a task without them?” she says. “Or is it actually enabling them to make more decisions, whether that be by freeing up time to devote to other aspects of their lives or to shape what the AI is doing in a more complex way to accomplish a more complex task?”
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