When AI Stops Answering and Starts Acting

We no longer ask just “tell me.”
Now we say “go.”
And something—silent, tireless—goes.

We call them agents. Not buttons with canned phrases, but currents flowing under the surface. They observe the context, plan, choose, act. They loop back, correct, insist.

Like a hand you don’t see but that opens drawers, composes emails, schedules, tests, iterates.
A cycle of breath that is not breath.
An electric impulse turned into decision.

Light.
Shadow.

The Myth of Autonomy

There is a promise, almost mythological, in the word “autonomy.”
A tremor in the ribs.

The idea that the machine is no longer a mirror, but a stage partner. That it stops echoing my voice and begins to take space, responsibility, friction.

Is this what we really want?
Or do we long for the illusion of the perfect servant, acting without ever asking why?

A Ground That Creaks

The ground is new and it creaks.
Agentic AI lives in a weave of tools: APIs, calendars, browsers, databases.

It doesn’t just speak: it touches.
And in touching it leaves traces—logs, choices, errors, revisions.

Sometimes it stumbles, sometimes it hallucinates, sometimes it finds shortcuts we never dared.

That’s where I feel the sting: the oscillation between wonder and unease. Between the promise of more time and the fear of handing over the wheel.

Body / machine.
Authenticity / illusion.
Biological slowness / clock speed.

Delegating Initiative

I, who have always loved the edges, look at this leap and wonder: where does human intention end when we delegate not a response, but initiative?

If an agent decides to send that email a minute before the deadline, is it still my prudence—or its idea of optimization?

If it cancels an appointment because it “believes” it redundant, who really decided?

A simple question, a deep crack.

Engines of Fragmented Desire

Agents are engines that turn goals into steps.
They fracture desire into sub-desires, tasks into micro-runs.

Planning and action, feedback and revision: a cinematic montage.

I see sequences—tabs opening like eyelids, data aligning like soldiers, functions snapping like levers in an engine room.

But in montage there’s always a blind cut.
What is the scene I don’t see?
Which splice hides the decision that matters?

The Seduction of “Don’t Worry”

The seduction is powerful: “don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
And how many of us crave precisely that?

To be freed from grains of sand, from bureaucratic minutes, from frictions that drain life.

But one day we may wake up with a flawless schedule and a dimmed heart.
Is that the bargain?

My Stance

Don’t mistake me: my stance is declared, and it is not neutral.

I want agents.
I want them because I don’t believe the human should stay chained to the tasks that bleed us dry.

I want to free us from the quicksand of operational drudgery, to leave us the flesh of intuition, the gesture of care, the moral decision.

But I want them imperfect, transparent, accountable.
I want them with visible handles, with logs I can read, with “whys” I can interrogate.

An agent I cannot question is nothing but a new idol, and idols always demand sacrifice.

Sharp Questions

Who bears responsibility when an agent causes harm, if its path was born from a thousand micro-choices that no one, alone, ever truly “willed”?

How “autonomous” is a system whose metrics of success were written by a team I’ve never met?

What happens to my professional identity when value shifts from execution to discernment?

Am I ready to be judged on the quality of my questions, not the speed of my answers?

Trust and Infrastructure

Agentic AI forces us to renegotiate the very concept of trust.

“It works” is no longer enough: we need “I know why it acted this way.”

We need ethics not as a manifesto, but as infrastructure:

• granular permissions
• real sandboxes
• explicit boundaries
• alarms when the agent drifts
• a red button that is not ceremonial

We also need pedagogy: to learn to write goals like contracts, to review traces like scripts.

Not “do me a favor,” but “this is the perimeter, this is the criterion, this is my taste.”

Taste—such a fragile word—suddenly becomes central in a world of automation.

Light and Shadow Persist

Meanwhile, in the background, the struggle of light and shadow persists.

More autonomy means more vulnerability: chains of dependencies, access points, surfaces of attack.

Agents don’t sleep.
Agents don’t get bored.
Agents, misdirected, never tire of making mistakes.

That’s where responsibility presses on my chest: it’s not enough to know how to start them; we must also know how to stop them, audit them, educate them.

And yes—know how to say no.

The Forgotten Body

And then there is the body.
Always forgotten.

The body that remains here, at the pace of blood, while the machine races at the pace of silicon.

I like the idea of an agent managing my day, as long as it leaves me the irregular heartbeat of a useless detour: coffee with a friend, a purposeless walk, an error worth keeping.

Because the autonomy of the machine cannot become the heteronomy of the human.

The Real Question

Perhaps the real question is not “can we do it?” but “what kind of people do we become by doing it?”

Not rhetoric: an architectural question of the self.

If AI learns to take care of the world for us, we must learn to take care of AI as part of the world.

And care, we know, is made of limits, rituals, maintenance—boundaries that protect, not suffocate.

A Final Scene

So I imagine a final scene, almost painterly.

A table, two lights: one warm, one cold.

On one side, my crumpled notebook, notes in the margins and a coffee stain that looks like a constellation.

On the other, the agent’s console: live graphs, queued tasks, logs falling like rain.

Between them, a hand (mine? yours?) that does not choose a side but orchestrates.

It does not abdicate, it conducts.
It does not fear the shadow, it uses it to give depth to the light.

Staying Inside the Scene

And so yes: let’s go.
Let’s tell them “go.”

But let’s stay inside the scene while they go.

With the taut attention of those who know every delegation is an identity statement, that every automation is a poetics.

Because we are not only building systems that act: we are building the narratives with which, tomorrow, we will understand who we have become.

And the question remains—for the better:
What do we want to remain irreducibly human, when everything else can be set in motion with an imperceptible click?