The Agent That Cannot Answer

The two preceding essays in this series, made a narrow argument. A certificate records that a process was completed but says nothing about whether judgement was formed; and an organisation that appoints on the certificate, then buys a fortnight’s course to close the gap, has chosen the least promising remedy available. If you have not read them, the summary is enough to follow what comes next.This essay charts the same substitution somewhere else: in the machines we have started calling agents, and the early evidence on what that is costing us is now in.We have begun handing work to systems we have agreed to call “agents”. I want to take up that word carefully, because I think it is doing something the people using it have not noticed, and because the thing it conceals is the thing for which boards and managers are supposed to exist.The Word That Cannot AnswerI should declare an interest, in the way an expert witness declares one: my doctoral work (2023) was on Edmund Burke…