The most useful framing of agentic AI I read this week was not about productivity. L.M. Sacasas (quoted in a recent issue of the Sentiers newsletter) argues that as agents take over more of the world's operations, they form something like a technological unconscious: a layer of activity that runs beneath awareness, shaping outcomes without deliberation we can inspect.

He borrows Erik Hoel's warning that this moves the operations of civilisation out from under the supervision of consciousness. That sounds abstract until you translate it into operational terms. Every workflow you hand to an agent is a decision you stop watching. Individually rational, collectively a system whose behaviour no one is positioned to interpret, because interpretation was never anyone's job.

Executives already know a version of this problem. Any large organisation develops processes that run on autopilot until an incident forces someone to ask why things work that way, and nobody remembers. Agentic systems industrialise that dynamic and remove the person who once remembered.
The governance implication is concrete: the audit function of the next decade is not reviewing decisions, it is keeping a map of which decisions are still being made consciously at all.

Who in your organisation holds that map today?

#AI #Governance #SystemsThinking

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