What's Missing in the 'Agentic' Story

For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local. You bought a laptop or desktop with an operating system, and it did what it said on the tin: it ran programs and stored files. You bought a spreadsheet and a word processor, and those programs performed those tasks and didn’t do anything else. Software that didn’t do this was in a separate bucket called ‘malware’ and we had ways of dealing with it. That assumption has a more general precedent in tools – whether they be staplers, screwdrivers, or telescopes. When you buy a screwdriver, it turns screws; it has no agency of its own. It might do other things, but that’s because you’re misusing the tool, not because it decided to do something else. Most things that people use unambiguously follow this pattern: for example, my mechanical wristwatch can’t do anything but tell me the time.1 That…