What is Agency? Placebo Culture, Agency Theater, Agentic AI

Imagine a world with 8 billion human minds and a trillion non-human, human-level AI minds. With such ratios, what is a “society”? Agentworld, a new Antikythera research unit, investigates new frameworks for understanding, modeling and composing the medium-term future of hybrid human-AI societies.

The most psychologically textured interactions will likely remain between humans, but humans and agents will also develop anthropologically rich patterns, ones that alter the evolution of language, mind, and population.

Agent-to-agent communication will constitute the vast majority of socially significant interactions. As a society within a society, agent divisions, hierarchies, and parallel systems intersect with those built from the templates of human society. Both evolve at an accelerated rate, in turn feeding back onto the organic forms from which they emerge and from which they depart. First, agents model humans, and then become the model against which humans model themselves.

Does AGI portend a future in which humans are left to manage the illusion of control? As agentic AI runs the material world under the hood, our place may be as a specialized leisure class: "Monitoring the Situation" via placebo dashboards, staging politics as a lifestyle content genre. By cultivating "agency porn" we have decoupled the experience of making an impact from any actual causal effect, so that we can feel like the protagonists of a machine we no longer steer.

Agentworld is a parallel ecology, sometimes deeply interwoven with human societies and other times seemingly autonomous from them. It evolves in relation to human organizations, which in turn adapt to these human-masked ghosts from the future. All niches are remade by the species that fill them, and the sudden presence of Agentworld makes it now part of the planetary niche that human societies historically fill and fix. Agentic machine intelligence is now a co-pilot of the Anthropocene and whatever comes next.

Join Antikythera for a keynote lecture with Director Benjamin Bratton on What is Agency?: Placebo Culture, Agency Theater, Agentic AI on Thursday, July 9 at the Platform Theatre Central Saint Martins in London.

Doors 5:30pm
Lecture 6:00pm

After the lecture, join Antikythera for an Agentworld afterwork mixer at Spiritland. Space is limited, please RSVP on Luma.

Co-hosted by CSM MA Narrative Environments and CSM Digital Innovation. Joined by collaborators from Google DeepMind and Disintegrator.

Antikythera is a think tank for planetary computation & the evolution of intelligence.

Benjamin Bratton is Director of Antikythera. He is Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at the University of California, San Diego. His research spans philosophy of technology, social and political theory, computational media & infrastructure, and speculative design. He is the author of several books including The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (Verso, 2021), The Terraforming (Strelka Press, 2019), and Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (e-flux/Sternberg Press, 2015). He previously directed several think-tanks at the Strelka Institute.