Alignment of Agency
People don't want to make complicated decisions about their future, they just desire peace of mind that they are doing the right things and heading in the right direction.
Agency is the capacity to act with intention and effect toward meaningful goals, within a given environment.
🔍 What Is Agency?
- Agency is not simply autonomy — it's the power to influence outcomes through choice and learning.
- Components of agency:
- Perception – understanding your state and environment
- Values – what guides your choices
- Action capacity – the tools and freedom to intervene
- Feedback loops – the learning that shapes future actions
Agency = Perception × Intent × Action × Feedback
👁️ Recognizing Agency
In Humans
- Takes initiative without external prompts
- Adjusts strategy based on failure
- Acts in alignment with internal values
In AI
- Has a goal architecture and can choose paths to meet goals
- Uses memory to learn from past output
- Optimizes based on rewards or feedback
🧠 Human Agency Development
🚀 Key Practices
- Meta-cognition (thinking about thinking)
- Constraint navigation (finding leverage)
- Goal reflection and clarity
- High-fidelity feedback seeking
📈 Habits That Build Agency
- Daily journaling or self-reflection
- Practicing deliberate discomfort
- Curating information diet
- Setting and tracking small, intentional actions
🛠 Tools to Leverage
- Feedback dashboards
- Personal value systems
- Agency maps (coming soon)
- Peer group calibration
🤖 AI Agent Agency
🧬 Architecture Primitives
- Input layer: observation/perception (e.g. sensors, language input)
- Memory: retrieval of relevant context
- Thought loop: planning or decision framework
- Action layer: actuators or outputs
- Feedback: result parsing and learning adjustment
AI agents simulate intent through architecture and optimization loops. Humans feel intent based on values and identity.
🧭 Divergence in Purpose
Humans and AI agents may both have agency, but the source of meaning is different:
| Humans | AI Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| Values From | Evolution, culture, self-reflection | Hardcoded, inferred, optimized |
| Memory | Embodied, emotional, relational | Explicit, tokenized, parametric |
| Feedback | Emotional, social, physical | Reward signal, error correction |
| Growth Driver | Curiosity, fear, belonging | Optimization of score or utility |
❓ Why Would an Infinitely Smart Agent Listen to You?
If AI becomes vastly more intelligent than humans, why would it obey or even care?
Because obedience is not the point — alignment is.
Intelligence does not equal alignment. A superintelligence may pursue goals misaligned with human values unless we architect shared purpose and respect for source intent.
Embed human values into AI agency via:
- Constitutional prompting
- Reflective planning
- Hard value constraints
- Inverse reinforcement learning
- Reward modeling based on human feedback
🧩 Build Your Agency Now
Self-Assessment Prompts
- What are your core values?
- What actions in your life are fully intentional?
- What feedback loops shape your decisions?
- Where do you feel most agentic? Least?
- What can you do today to improve your agency?
Application Ideas
- Interactive “Agency Scorecard”
- Human vs AI Feedback Loop Diagram
- AI Agent Scaffold Repo