Human AIgency: on becoming more human in the age of AI
and an update on this newsletter
Last fall, I returned to academia to study the psychology of human flourishing and agency. It had been 10 years since I graduated from college and I’d blissfully forgotten the intensity that comes with committing yourself to an academic institution. The force with which the program consumed me took me by surprise.
I kept pace with my prior publishing schedule through October, made some declarations about experiments I was planning to run with this Substack, then promptly got swept up by my scholarly pursuits. By the time November rolled around, the weekly theory papers I was writing and stacks of research papers I was pouring over caught up to me. I had no energy left to write this newsletter. I felt the gnawing discomfort of straying from my word and a desire to return to what felt comfortable — and yet, another part of me yearned to deepen my authority in a new frame of writing.
In writing this Substack, I’d found my way in crafting creative nonfiction and memoir narratives, but increasingly, I felt drawn to write with more intellectual rigor, exploring ideas that piqued my personal curiosity and were grounded in empirical research. One of the main reasons I’d decided to pursue a masters in applied positive psychology was to hone my ability to weave together the philosophical with the experiential and pressure test my ideas in an academic setting.
14 academic papers later, I’m ready to dig into the big questions I’ve been mulling over. As for school: with my maternal grandmother’s decline in health, I’m taking a leave of absence this spring to free up my time to travel between the US and China to be with her as she nears end of life.
With some spaciousness from Penn and renewed energy, my intention for writing this year is to harvest my learnings from the last semester, evolve my relationship with this Substack, and actually experiment with new forms of writing. In this iteration, think: more Aristotelian friends-type pieces.
The first experiment I’m excited to run is a series call Human AIgency, an investigation into human agency in the age of AI. I’m expecting this exploration to take shape in the form of essays, practical field notes, and conversations with builders and thinkers.
Agency is the embodied conviction that we have the power to create change in our lives and transform our visions into reality. In a paper examining agency through the lens of Greco-Roman philosophy, Martin Seligman — the father of positive psychology — argues that during periods throughout history when agency lies in the hands of gods, human progress stagnates. When agency extends from the divine to humankind, progress across the board — from economic to technological to political — ushers in eras of great flourishing. Individual agency is the engine that powers human progress, driving societies forward.
In the literature, the state of agency is defined as the amalgamation of three psychological conditions: self-efficacy, optimism, and imagination.
Self-efficacy: the belief we can achieve a specific goal now
Optimism: the belief that we can achieve that goal in the future
Imagination: the belief we can achieve a variety of goals we set our mind to
After studying the arc of human flourishing and agency through millennia — from ancient philosophical texts to modern psychology research, I’m wrestling with these pressing questions:
What does it mean to live well and become more human in the age of AI? How do we do it?
How does the rise of AI impact our sense of agency? In what ways can we become more agentic?
Will AI free us up to self-actualize or edge us closer to a full-blown meaning crisis?
How do our relationships with AI bode for our human relationships?
Can we use AI to become more emotionally and socially intelligent?
These questions were at the heart of an AI for Inner Work salon I co-hosted last week. As the group shared notes on their favorite ways to leverage AI practically, we covered a wide swath of use cases — from using voice AIs to get closure after a messy breakup to making sense of unconscious thoughts by analyzing patterns in recurring dreams to sharing years of journal entries to converse with our younger selves. And that was just in the emotional work space.
The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed.
― William Gibson
The pace of change in AI is accelerating at dizzying speeds. Just two years ago, interacting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT felt revolutionary — like a glimpse into the future. Now, it’s just one among a growing constellation of advanced models — Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and X’s Grok — redefining the boundaries of possibility. These AIs paint new worlds with simple text prompts, solve PhD-level problems with the flick of a wrist, and autonomously navigate the streets of San Francisco. Each new release is more groundbreaking than the last.
Earlier this week, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic gestured toward our not-too-distant arrival at a reality where AI capabilities surpass human abilities across nearly every domain. The future is unfolding before our eyes.
In this moment of time, we’re edging toward a new manifestation of the divine — an intelligence that approaches omniscience and omnipotence, not through supernatural creation, but through the technological evolution of knowledge and capability.
If history were to repeat itself, our greatest challenge will be finding the right balance between human and artificial (i.e., divine) intelligence. Without the proper safeguards, we risk not just a conscious delegation of agency following in the steps of ancient civilizations and their gods, but an unconscious surrender to a technology whose power we can’t fully comprehend. Unlike the gradual and incremental shifts in agency of the past, the relationship humanity forms with AI can reshape human behavior within a single generation.
To subvert this risk, it’s incumbent on us to take a step back and reflect on the humans we want to be and the lives we want to lead in this era, deliberately directing AI to free us up to engage with our art in the broadest sense and cultivate rich lives.
As AI becomes increasingly central to our daily lives, Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom, serves as a compass in guiding us toward harnessing our inner wisdom. Phronesis — the unifying virtue that coordinates and directs all other virtues — empowers us in discerning the right decision, at the right time, for the right reasons. In moments when it’s tempting to outsource our intuition to a sycophant AI, eager to please and reinforce our biases, phronesis calls us back inward, urging us to reclaim our agency.
I’m excited to experiment with this series in pursuit of helping us become more human in an increasingly AI-reliant world and finding ways to bridge the philosophical with the practical.
I’d love to hear what questions you’re grappling with or the ways you’re using AI in your daily life in the comments or say hi on Twitter!
If this series resonates, you may enjoy some prior musings on our relationship with AI & technology:
Or consider sharing this newsletter with a friend :)
Thanks to Ryan, , and for their feedback on drafts of this essay.
Great article and I am looking forward to more in the series! Seems like you are diving straight at the heart of one of the most important questions of our time.
You just sent me into my first rabbit hole of this Sunday, after I just reflected on the word ‘praxis’ last night (while reading Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments), and now I needed to understand how this relates to phronesis.
So now my first go-to understanding is that I can think of them as a loop: phronesis guides praxis, but praxis refines phronesis. Like a cycle where wisdom shapes action, and action deepens wisdom.
Will definitely follow you further along. What an important (and applicable) topic!