The Future Belongs to PEOPLE with Agency, not AI Agents

Our future isn’t about grand architectural statements or gravity-defying vehicles, but something far more fundamental: who gets to decide what happens next.

My thesis is the future will be decided by people with the most agency.

Now, that might sound a bit like saying water is wet, or that politicians are occasionally economical with the truth. But bear with me, because the implications are rather more startling than you might imagine.

For the better part of a century, if you wanted to do anything of consequence in this world (build a widget, sell a service, get your idea to market) you needed to be rather large.

Enormous, in fact.

You needed a corporation so vast it likely had its own postcode, its own internal bureaucracy that could rival a small nation-state, and enough layers of management to make a trifle look positively minimalist.

To be a player, you needed scale. Massive, jaw-dropping scale. You needed capital, an awful lot of it. You needed infrastructure, meaning factories that…