I have spent a lot of the last year thinking about agency because I have spent a lot of the last year feeling what it is like to lose it. Not in some science-fiction sense, but in the ordinary human sense: You know what you believe, you know who you want to be, and you love the people around you, but fear, anger, shame, exhaustion, or ego gets there first.
I’m beginning to gain some of that agency back thanks to AI. There are problems in the world I care about deeply, things I want to build, ways I want to be useful, and a future I want my daughter to inherit. For a long time, the distance between caring about something and being capable of doing anything meaningful about it felt enormous.
AI has shortened that distance. The barrier to entry to solve personal problems is collapsing. It made some things that belonged in the category of maybe someday move into the category of start now. For me, that has been hopeful in a way that is hard to explain without sounding dramatic.
I have felt enough despair over the last year to know that hope cannot just mean believing everything will work out. I don’t believe that. Things don’t always work out. People hurt each other. We repeat things we swore we would never repeat. Good intentions fail. Technology creates new problems while solving old ones.
The hope I have found is smaller and more demanding than optimism. It is this: There may still be a choice available that did not exist a moment ago. Maybe I can learn. Maybe I can build the tool I wish had existed. Maybe an ordinary person, given enough leverage, can solve a problem that once felt completely beyond reach. Maybe intelligence becoming abundant means more people get to participate in shaping the future instead of waiting for institutions to do it for them.
The future I want is not one where machines gain more agency while humans surrender theirs. I want more of us to get a chance to ask: What do I actually want to happen next? And then act accordingly. That is the future I am trying to build.
