There’s a lot of hype about AI agents. If you are a lawyer in a big law firm, the story goes, you will soon have a team of AI agents that you can use to accomplish various tasks in service of your most important clients. Ditto for a Big Four firm accountant running an annual audit for a major Fortune 500 company. Some of this work is already underway with AI agents at the most ambitious firms; others will surely come to work with AI agents before long.

OpenAI’s recent acquisition of OpenClaw, an open-source, autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on a user’s computer, is a sign that AI agents are quickly being given more responsibilities and more access—from emails to bank accounts, a decision with unintended consequences, including deleted inboxes and Amazon Web Services outages. Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, said he wants to “build an agent that even my mum can use.” But there is a difference between using technology to improve efficiency and giving technology agency that humans should hold. 

These developments prompt hard questions, particularly for young people who are seeking agency in their personal and professional lives. Does it make sense to train to be an actuary if AI is supposed to be good at predicting unknown outcomes based on data? Is it worth the cost today to train to be a........

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