How Can You Reclaim Your Human Agency from AI?

There's the moment, and it happens more than we are willing to admit, when we open a search bar on our computer or a chat window, or even a voice assistant, and we pause. We had that one thought and that one nearly half-formed question. We were curious about something. Why, for example, is the weather different today, or what does a certain word mean? Where is the latest recipe for a nice cake? And then, before that thought has time to become ours, or we look in a book, ask our neighbours, or just think for a while, we type it into a machine. We ask the machine, and the machine answers instantly and very correctly.We may not notice at this moment that this is our capacity to not know something for a little while and just be curious about something.

The Slow Atrophy of Human Agency

The problem we're facing today with artificial intelligence is the slow atrophy of human agency. The biggest tech platforms speak about human agency as something we can control like a switch that you can turn on and off. They tell you that you are in control. You can choose your preferences and settings, and, of course, it's your data. But our agency is not a preference. It’s about doing something over and over again, in the smallest moments of everyday life. And the way to practice the piano isn’t by playing scales because scales are beautiful, but because your fingers need to remember what your mind forgets.

Agency is the decision to remain, for that moment, in the form of your own uncertainty, like in a fog of thoughts, and to find that the fog itself has a texture that it teaches you something, that shapes your own mind. What AI offers, and it offers this with a lot of generosity, is the elimination of that fog. Every hesitation can be erased, every gap and knowledge can be filled now, and every creative flaw you have can be bypassed just by asking AI. The machine is very patient, never ill, working 24/7 for you, tireless and never offended by the maybe stupidity of your thinking.

And that is precisely the problem. It’s not that the machine is wrong here, but it’s equally certain that we’re forgetting how to be productive and how to make mistakes. This may sound nostalgic, and every generation on this planet has experienced the introduction of new technologies. The printing press displaced memorization in the European tradition, and calculators have weakened our mental arithmetic, while mathematics advanced and technical tools freed us up to tackle more demanding tasks. So why should it be any different with AI?

How to Make Your Skills Meaningful

It is different for one reason, because AI does not merely replace a skill. It replaces the struggle that made that skill meaningful. A calculator replaces arithmetic but not mathematical thinking. It is a tool that eliminates the need for mechanical work, while leaving cognitive and creative work unaffected. AI, by contrast, now can write you a paragraph and can create a whole text that includes pictures, music, and movies. It can compose your email in your tone, you can now letting an AI Agent develop your business and financial strategies. AI can debug your code, plan your meals, summarize your reading, and draft your apology to your friend. Sometimes, even better than you would have done it yourself. The question is no longer what the tool can do for me. The question now is what is left for us as humans to do.

Instead of celebrating every new AI agent, leaders should create the time and space for attention and expertise within their organizations. If the time saved through AI is not consciously reinvested in human skills, judgment, and interpersonal relationships, AI will indeed boost productivity, but at the same time permanently limit human potential for creative thinking.

And the answer the big AI and tech companies give you at the moment is that you do the higher thinking, the creative direction, and the prompt engineering. But this is not an answer at all. It seems to be an argument that you become the manager of a machine that lives your life for you.

But Agency must be practised, not preserved, not protected, not legislated back into existence. It must be exercised daily, in small, deliberate, slightly inconvenient ways, like the way one exercises a muscle when you are at the gym. These are all everyday tasks that the modern life no longer requires, but the soul still demands.

Let us look at five activities, almost embarrassingly ordinary, and this is the point about this.

• Cook without a recipe, at least once a week. Open your refrigerator, look at what is there, and smell the herbs, taste the leftovers. Make something that has no name. It may look very strange, but it tastes very good. And the act of translating raw ingredients into a meal through nothing but your own senses and memory is one of the oldest forms of human intelligence, and it is exercised very creatively, with improvisation, and not with prompt crafting on your computer. The meal is not the point. What matters is that you think for yourself and be creative, both when preparing the meal and later when enjoying a fantastic dinner together with your family.
• Always write the first draft yourself. Before you ask an AI to help you write something, just write for yourself. Just one paragraph or just one page. Just a mess of half-thoughts or broken syntax, and do not edit this. Let the words be wrong and the sentences as they are. What you're doing isn't producing a perfect document. You are just hearing your own mind, which sounds honest and not like a polished output. You can always turn to the machine later, but the first draft is yours, because if you never write it yourself, you’ll gradually lose the ability to distinguish your own voice from that of the machine. And at the end, when we all use machines, all texts will sound the same.
• Go on a walk, and get lost on purpose. Leave your phone in the car, tell your family or your partner you're going for a walk. Walk the neighbourhood, maybe a neighbourhood you do not know. Navigate only by landmarks, or by the sun in its position. You will not be efficient and will not be looking at your smartwatch to see how many steps you've taken. You will arrive somewhere that the algorithm did not choose for you, and you will have made 100 micro decisions along the way. Walking left or right, and this or in that street or the other one, and stop here and watch the birds, the trees now in spring.
• Sit with a question for 24 hours before searching for the answer. When you ask questions like, what is that actor's name? How many innings needed the baseball team to be successful in that era? How does that machine work that I have to use to finish my garden work? Do not immediately reach for the AI tool that can answer it for you. Let the question live for a day, and you will be surprised by what your memory brings up, what connections your unconscious mind can make, and what other questions arise from this first. Capture your thoughts in handwritten notes in a Moleskine notebook by using a fountain pen to put your deepest thoughts down on paper. The goal is not to arrive at the correct answer, the goal is to remember what it feels like to think about something rather than to look up something immediately on your mobile phone.
• Make one decision a day that you cannot explain to an algorithm. Choose just one very expensive coffee because your barista is a handsome guy who smiled. Or take a longer route because the light outside and nature in the evening is so beautiful right now. Call your friend, not because he told you, but because you're feeling that you need to call him now. These irrational, inefficient, beautiful human decisions are the noise that the optimization engine wants to eliminate. Never make important decisions hastily, and don’t let a machine handle them entirely on its own; they are what truly define your life in this high-tech age. Live this moments of feeling a cognitive discomfort, because your are not asking a machine, but your are benefiting from friction‑maxxing.

By 2026, people will return to a slower pace of life and manual labor in order to regain the discernment that was once ensured by the friction caused by inefficiencies. In our lives dominated by AI and technological applications, a simple, analog lifestyle with productive challenges fosters your deep creative thinking and joy.

There's no going back to a world without digital tools and AI, and we're not asking you to try. The machine is here, and it's useful, and in many cases, it is really good.

But usefulness is not the same as wisdom, and efficiency is not the same as meaning. The most important things in a human life is the trust that builds slowly between people. The thoughts that reshape you over months, the creative breakthrough that arises only after weeks of failure. These things cannot be optimized, they can only be lived through.

Tech companies will tell you that resistance is unnecessary, that progress is inevitable, and that you should adapt, or you should just leave it. But adaptation without intention is not an evolution, and it's just erasing what we've learned over thousands of years in human history.

And the question is not whether you can keep up with the machine. The question is: if you delegate enough of your thinking, creating, deciding, and remembering to a machine, what are you left with?