AI will take your job, erase your identity, make you stupid. Band together around humanity to fight the robots.
This narrative serves people who built careers on controlling others. When you can solve problems without asking permission, everyone who spent decades being the person who grants permission discovers they're now the bottleneck.
Control breaks when people stop asking. And they stop asking when they have tools that let them solve problems directly.
Agency gets taken, then given.
Taking agency means solving the problem without asking permission. Most people never try this because every system taught them the opposite: follow instructions, wait for assignments, seek approval. School had you raise your hand. Work had you wait for your manager. Both convinced you someone else sets the rules.
Giving agency is harder but necessary. If your expertise lives only in your head, you become the bottleneck. Every problem that requires your knowledge stops until you're available. You scale linearly when the organization needs to scale exponentially. So you take what you know and turn it into tools anyone can use without you: learn technologies you avoided, break down processes that exist only in your head, accept that making your expertise accessible makes you less necessary for individual problems but more valuable for building capacity.
People who take and give agency build organizations where problems get solved without approval queues. The shift connects people to problems instead of tasks, makes them accountable for results rather than compliance.
Technology serves whoever wields it. Some add AI to preserve hierarchy. Others use it to collapse approval structures.
Choose which you're building.