“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
These are the words of science fiction author Frank Herbert, published in Dune in 1965. Today, sixty years later, they still serve as a warning, though the danger looks different from what Herbert imagined.
We don’t need other humans using machines to enslave us. We might be beginning to do it ourselves. The cognitive outsourcing starts with the small stuff. Drafting emails. Planning travel. Scheduling meetings. Synthesizing research. Systems handle the small tasks, then the medium ones, then increasingly complex chains of work.
In this newsletter, we examine the growing shift from AI as a “tool” to AI as an agent, and what happens when generative AI, limited to whatever it is prompted to do next, graduates into agentic AI.
