I read this piece in Futurism this morning, highlighting anxiety among employees at Anthropic about the very tools they are building. Agent-based AI systems designed to automate professional tasks are advancing quickly, and even insiders are expressing unease that these systems could displace forms of work that have long anchored identity and livelihood. The familiar story is one of replacement with machines and agents taking jobs, efficiency outpacing meaning, and productivity outrunning dignity.
“It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”
That narrative is understandable. It is also incomplete.
It assumes agency is something discrete, something possessed. Either humans have it or ai agents do. Either labor is done by us or by them. This framing reflects a deeply modern inheritance in which action is imagined as individual, bounded, and owned. But if we step back and look phenomenologically, ecologically, even theologically, agency rarely appears that way in lived experience.
However, agency unfolds relationally. It arises through environments, histories, infrastructures, bodies, tools, and attentional fields that exceed any single actor. Whitehead described events as occasions within webs of relation rather than isolated units of causation. Merleau-Ponty reminded us that perception itself is co-constituted with the world it encounters. Edith Stein traced empathy as a participatory structure that bridges subjectivities. In each of these traditions, action is never solitary. It is ecological.
Seen from this vantage, AI agents do not simply replace agency. They redistribute it.
Workplaces become assemblages of human judgment, algorithmic suggestion, interface design, energy supply, and data pipelines. Decisions emerge from entanglement while expertise shifts from individual mastery toward collaborative navigation of hybrid systems. What unsettles people is not merely job loss, but the destabilization of familiar coordinates that once made agency legible to us.
This destabilization is not unprecedented. Guild laborers faced mechanization during the Industrial Revolution(s). Scribes faced it with the advent of the printing press. Monastics faced it when clocks began structuring devotion instead of bells and sunlight. Each moment involved a rearrangement of where attention was placed and how authority was structured. The present transition is another such rearrangement, though unfolding at computational speed.
Attention is the deeper currency here.
Agent systems promise efficiency precisely because they absorb attentional burden. They monitor, synthesize, draft, suggest, and route. But attention is not neutral bandwidth. It is a formative ecological force. Where attention flows, worlds take shape. If attentional responsibility migrates outward into technical systems, the question is not whether humans lose agency. It is what kinds of perception and responsiveness remain cultivated in us.
This is the moment where the conversation often stops short as discussions of automation typically orbit labor markets or productivity metrics or stock values. Rarely do they ask what habits of awareness diminish when engagement becomes mediated through algorithmic intermediaries. What forms of ecological attunement grow quieter when interaction shifts further toward abstraction.
And rarer still is acknowledgment of the material ecology enabling this shift.
Every AI agent relies on infrastructure that consumes electricity, water, land, and minerals. Data centers do not hover in conceptual space. They occupy watersheds. They reshape local grids. They alter thermal patterns. They compete with agricultural and municipal electrical grid and water demands. These realities are not peripheral to agency, but are conditions through which agency is enacted.
In places like here in the Carolinas, where digital infrastructure continues expanding exponentially, it seems the redistribution of agency is already tangible. Decisions about automation are inseparable from decisions about energy sourcing, zoning, and water allocation. The ecological footprint of computation folds into local landscapes long before its outputs appear in professional workflows.
Agency, again, proves ecological.
To recognize this is not to reject AI systems or retreat into Luddite nostalgia. The aim is attentiveness rather than resistance. Transitions of this magnitude call for widening perception (and resulting ethics) rather than narrowing judgment. If agency is relational, then responsibility must be relational as well. Designing, deploying, regulating, and using these tools all participate in shaping the ecologies they inhabit.
Perhaps the most generative question emerging from this moment is not whether artificial intelligence will take our agency. It is whether we can learn to inhabit redistributed agency wisely. Whether we can remain perceptive participants rather than passive recipients. Whether we can sustain forms of attention capable of noticing both digital transformation and the soils, waters, and energies through which it flows.
Late in the afternoon, sitting near the black walnut I’ve been tracking the past year, these abstractions tend to settle. Agency there is unmistakably ecological as we’d define it. Wind, insects, light, decay, growth, and memory intermingle without boundary disputes. Nothing acts alone, and nothing possesses its influence outright. The tree neither competes with nor yields to agency. It participates.
Our technologies, despite their novelty, do not remove us from that condition. They draw us deeper into it. The question is whether we will learn to notice.