Agentic AI is currently being sold as a way to get more done, often by companies like Meta and xAI, whose business models already depend on keeping us inside their feeds.
The productivity gain is a real thing. And yet, there are other moving pieces that we would be wise to pay attention to.
Once everyone has an agent that writes faster and handles routine work, that capacity stops being much of an advantage.
The system we entered to get that capacity remains, along with everything it learned about us.
The lasting question is how much freedom we retain to operate outside it.
This is not hypothetical. xAI has connected an always-on agent directly to X. Meta has launched Muse, a personal agent designed to move across everyday apps and act with the benefit of remembered context.
Muse is being offered for free.
Most of us know that in the economic system we inhabit, nothing is free.
Social media has largely known us through attention: what makes us stop and what brings us back. A useful agent needs enough working context to understand what we are trying to create and why.
I use AI every day and I want far more people using agentic AI because I think it can undam an extraordinary amount of human creativity and give us capacities that used to belong to large organizations.
That is why I care how we enter this transition.
The larger opportunity is to use AI to accrue greater autonomy.
We can understand more of the systems shaping our lives and build alternatives instead of living entirely inside someone else’s defaults.
If AI returns time and perspective to us, more of us can participate in decisions currently made by a very small slice of humanity.
However, that future is not guaranteed.
Refusing AI does not slow the people setting the defaults. It removes us from the process. On the other hand, using the first free agent attached to Facebook should not become our default without a serious look at where that doorway leads.
On October 7, I’m hosting a live session called Trigger Point: AI to help illuminate for you what the terms of this transition are before they harden around us.
If you come, you will learn how to harness the power of AI without trading away your autonomy.
We already lived through the uncontrolled experiment of social media. We should not repeat the same mistakes in the AI Era.