Opinion | All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’ - The New York Times

I first noticed the phrase when it cropped up in conversations among my friends, as a dichotomy: Were we “high agency” or “low agency”? Intuitively, I had a sense of what that meant, and which side of that divide I should want to be on. Was inertia or timidity keeping us in a city, a job or a relationship? Or were we the captains of the ships of our own lives, thinking about career pivots, trying out vibe-coding, remembering that we could move to the desert and start a whole new life? When asked what skills to develop in the age of A.I., the first one Sam Altman listed was, “Become high agency.” Google search interest in “high agency” has been increasing for five years and spiked enormously in the past year. In a recent article for Harper’s, Sam Kriss noted that in tech job interviews, it’s now common for prospective employees to be asked whether they were “mimetic" or “agentic.” The basic idea of “agency” has long been theorized and debated in philosophy, in relation to free will and

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• Lailah Nabegu