The AI Agency Gap: AI’s Growing Autonomy and the Future of Human Decision-Making
We are optimizing AI for action while designing education systems that produce passive learners. It doesn’t have to be this way. If we want to build agency, we need to start now.
For years, we’ve measured AI’s progress by comparing it to human intelligence:
How much data it can process
How quickly it can outperform us on specific tasks
How convincingly it can generate human-like responses.
But this was never the right comparison.
Because intelligence was never the goal. Agency was.
And no one is keeping that a secret. AI researchers and companies aren’t just focused on making machines smarter; they are relentlessly ambitious about making them more autonomous. They’re designing AI to take initiative, make decisions, and operate without human intervention. And in many ways, this mirrors the ambitions of competency-based learning, a model that has long emphasized mastery, adaptability, and self-direction over rote memorization.
This is what I shared at my keynote last year at the Aurora Institute, how AI’s rapid trajectory toward agency serves as a wake-up call for education. If we are building machines to be independent thinkers, why aren’t we doing the same for people?
And this year as we see AI companies deliver on their vision, faster than the graduate profile can in most schools everyone’s asking: What happens in a world where we advance agency in machines faster than we do in humans?
P.S. If AI is making cheating easier, the real problem isn’t the technology, it’s the way we’ve designed learning. I created a free mini course with an experience you can facilitate to have this conversation with your team. Download it here.
Because if you don’t take control of the conversation. Someone else will.
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious generation shared:
I’m now studying education technology because our schools are stuffed full of edtech, and everything is gamified, and yes you’ll get more engagement but there is a cost. When you gamify a quarter of a kids day thats a lot of dopamine, do s something get a reward, do something get a reward. Thats a lot of quick dopamine, so when you take it away they are in a deficit state which means everything is boring and unpleasant.
Andrej Karpathy, Founding Team at OpenAI recently tweeted:
Agency is greater than intelligence, because intelligence alone doesn’t guarantee control. The smartest system in the world means nothing if it isn’t the one making decisions. AI is rapidly surpassing us in intelligence, but what truly matters is who holds the ability to take action, set direction, and shape the future. If we’re not careful, AI won’t just outthink us, it will out-decide us.
Paul Roetzer on the Marketing AI Institute podcast echoed the same concern:
AI is not just a tool; it’s becoming a decision-maker. The question is, who or what, is actually in control?
So why is agency on everyone’s minds? Because AI companies are delivering on their vision: We see it in China’s new autonomous agent - Manus. We see it in ChatGPT’s Operator mode, designed to continuously act on a user’s behalf, scheduling, summarizing, and making decisions within set constraints. We see it in Google’s AI Studio, and my friend Darren Coxen does a brilliant example here.
And this is what we are discussing this week on the podcast.
The Disengagement Gap: Why Students Are Checking Out
While AI is being optimized for action, humans are being trained as passengers along for the ride and nowhere is this more evident than in education.
Rebecca Winthrop, Youssef Shoukry, and David Nitkin define this as the disengagement gap: the growing divide between what young people need to thrive and what education systems actually provide. Next week, I’ll be speaking on a panel with Rebecca Winthrop, where we’ll explore the reality of student engagement today: most students aren’t actively learning; they’re just going through the motions.
Their research identifies four modes of student engagement, showing how students move through school based on the quality of their learning experiences:
Resisters – Students who are actively disengaged, disrupting class, skipping school, or refusing to participate.
Passengers – Those who show up, do the bare minimum, and coast through school without real investment in learning.
Achievers – Students who work hard, follow the rules, and succeed academically, but often become risk-averse and hyper-focused on external validation.
Explorers – The rare students who are deeply engaged, think critically, take initiative, and shape their own learning.
The problem?
Less than 10% of students report schooling experiences that support Explorer mode.
Most students sit in Passenger or Achiever mode, participating but never truly taking ownership of their learning. Meanwhile, AI is being trained to function like an Explorer: proactive, adaptive, and constantly improving.
This is the real crisis. We are designing AI to be more capable of independent action than the very students who will grow up alongside it. We see the consequences of this everywhere. When students feel like their choices don’t matter, they disengage. Instead of thinking critically, they look for the fastest way to complete an assignment. Instead of grappling with uncertainty, they wait for the next set of instructions. Instead of learning how to navigate complexity, they outsource decisions to AI.
And here’s where it gets worse: instead of spending time assessing the root causes as the Disengagement Gap points out, after seeing what Manus was able to do, some believe the solution is even more control proposing eye scanners!
Restoring Trust and Empowering Students as Decision-Makers
If AI scares you, it’s likely because you’ve been operating with only 10% of who you are and what you’re capable of. The real fear isn’t AI, it’s realizing how much of your potential has been left untapped. And to discover these answers the answer to disengagement isn’t more control, it’s more trust and more dialogue.
If we want young people to be engaged, self-directed learners, they need opportunities to develop the skills that allow them to navigate an AI-driven world with confidence. That means moving away from rigid systems that assume students need constant surveillance and instead empowering them as decision-makers with real agency over their learning.
This is where my WISE Framework comes in.
Instead of reducing decisions to "AI is cheating" or worse a set of traffic lights, WISE encourages students to engage thoughtfully and ethically with AI tools. It helps them build self-awareness, transparency, and accountability in their decision-making.
A set of skills that as COO Daniel Shapero said will be one of the most important interview questions you’ll have to answer: Tell me a time you used AI at home or at work. The WISE framework helps young people, and everyone develop a habit of self awareness using the following four questions:
This framework isn’t just about AI, it’s about building the habits of agency that will serve students throughout their lives. Because the future of education isn’t about banning AI or mindlessly adopting it. It’s about ensuring that students develop the awareness to use it in ways that empower them, rather than make them dependent.
Want to learn how to integrate this into your own classroom, school, or work?
AI as a Tool for Liberation, Not Control
With tools like Canva, ChatGPT, Claude, and countless others, we have more opportunities than ever to liberate ourselves from the monotony of traditional work and schooling.
AI shouldn’t be something we fear, or try to control, it should be something we use to free up space for creativity, critical thinking, and meaningful work. The challenge isn’t whether AI will be part of our lives, it already is.
The challenge is whether we will teach people how to lead in this environment, or allow them to become passive users of technology that increasingly shapes their choices. Because the future belongs to those who don’t just use AI, but who understand how to remain in control of their decisions. And can articulate those decisions to others.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss working together to bring agency to your learners you can learn more at designingschools.org.