What is 'agency'? And why does it matter for AI literacy?

At a recent online meeting about AI and education, a leading academic objected strongly to the phrase “hybrid intelligence”. AI, this person argued, is like a pair of glasses. Glasses may shape what someone can do, and may have a significant effect on a life, but they remain a tool. To ascribe agency to glasses is a misuse of language. To describe a person wearing glasses as a cyborg or hybrid might be technically true in some trivial sense, but it is not useful for understanding what it means to be human.

To dramatise the point, this person mimed stamping their glasses underfoot — quite difficult to do on a Zoom call — and said that, even without them, they remained pretty much the same person.

Behind the objection was a serious political concern: if we describe AI as agentic, intelligent, or as a genuine partner in thought, we may end up helping big tech companies present it as a replacement for human beings.

The academic looking in the mirror saw a human animal wearing glasses and did not identify with the glasses. Presumably they identified more with the organic flesh and bone. But this already assumes that who we are is best understood from the outside, as an object in the world, rather than from the inside, as a living process of perception and meaning-making.

From the inside, the experience is different. Once worn, glasses are no longer simply external. They withdraw from attention and become part of the structure of seeing itself. The glasses, like the retina and the optic nerve, are part of the condition under which the world appears to you.

The same is true, more profoundly, of language, literacy, and education. These are not external instruments that leave thought untouched. They become part of the way thought happens. The very concepts with which the academic criticised hybridity, concepts such as “agency”, “tool”, and “misuse of language”, are themselves products of a history of education, writing, and print literacy. Technology in this form shapes thought from within.

Human intelligence has always been formed through language, symbols, writing, institutions, and tools. We are always already hybrid. The real question is whether working with AI might open up new and perhaps better forms of hybrid thinking.

Why agency matters

Agency is not a simple term. It admits of degrees, and the interesting question is always which degree we are talking about.

A river has causal power. A thermostat regulates temperature. Neither has moral responsibility. An AI system that filters your email, proposes actions, books meetings, summarises documents, and prompts decisions clearly does more than a pair of glasses or a hammer does. It does not merely focus light or extend force. It selects, prioritises, and initiates within a defined field. That is a real kind of agency, even if it is not yet moral agency.

So perhaps AI does not “have agency” in the full human sense. But it has some kind of agency. We might say that AI can exhibit operational agency without possessing moral agency. Put that way, the claim becomes less alarming and more precise.

In fact, even the human claim to agency is less secure than we often assume. We like to imagine ourselves as conscious authors of our decisions, clearly knowing why we do what we do. But psychology offers a more modest picture. People often confabulate reasons after the event. Actions emerge from habits, contexts, impulses, and social cues long before they are neatly gathered under the story of an autonomous self acting for good reasons.

This does not mean human agency is unreal. It means it is situated, mediated, and always distributed across communities that include both people and technologies. Our most effective agency often lies not in sovereign moments of choice but in the slower capacity to shape the environments, habits, institutions, and relationships within which action becomes possible. We can design our environments and our future selves in ways that increase our capacity for moral agency. I think that this is what education is for.

What then is AI literacy?

AI is not only another tool to be used efficiently to achieve pre-given ends. It is a new medium of thought. Print literacy changed cognition by making certain habits of mind easier: linear argument, explicit analysis, separation of variables, cumulative reasoning across extended texts. These habits came to seem natural, but they were historically produced.

AI literacy may be similarly transformative. It can make it easier to externalise half-formed thoughts and develop them through dialogue. It can make it easier to generate alternatives, test assumptions, connect domains, simulate consequences, and revise ideas iteratively. It invites a style of thinking that is less about producing a finished statement in one go and more about reframing, probing, comparing, and redesigning.

This does not mean AI makes people more intelligent by default. It can just as easily support laziness, offloading, and conformity. Everything depends on how it is framed and used. A lot depends on the model built by AI providers, but a lot also depends on the pedagogy, on how we teach AI literacy. If approached instrumentally, as a shortcut to outputs, it may well diminish thought. But if approached dialogically, as a way of opening, widening, and deepening reflection, it can support new forms of individual and collective intelligence.

AI does not yet inhabit a world of meaning in the way human beings do. It does not desire, care, answer, or assume responsibility in the full sense. But it can participate in human processes of meaning-making in ways that reshape how thinking happens. That is already enough to make AI literacy far more than a technical competence.

In the end, the question is not whether AI is more like a pair of glasses or more like a colleague. It is whether we learn to use it in ways that make us more reflective, more creative, and more capable of acting well together. That is what AI literacy is for.