AI Governance and The Agentic State

➡ The ‘agentic state’ is a mental state where people feel they’re just carrying out orders from someone in charge. This idea was studied in experiments where volunteers, thinking they were part of a memory study, gave electric shocks to others when they answered questions wrong. This showed that in the agentic state, people feel less responsible for their actions because they believe they’re just following orders. A recent report suggests that ‘agentic AI’ could change how public administration works, especially in times of multiple, connected crises.

The agentic state is a psychological condition where individuals see themselves as agents executing the wishes of an authority figure. This concept was explored in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments where participants administered painful electrical shocks to others under the direction of an authority figure. Volunteers were told they were taking part in scientific research to improve memory. Would you open those and tell me which of you was which, please? The teacher. Separated by a screen, the teacher would ask the learner questions in a word game and administer an electric shock when the answer was incorrect. He was told to increase the voltage with each wrong answer.

Cloud. Horse. Rock. House. Answer. Wrong. 150 volts. Answer. Horse. Experiment. That’s all. Get me out of here. These experiments showed that the agentic state leads to a loss of individual responsibility. Those involved believe they are simply following orders and doing the right thing. It was a time, I suspect, when men and women could give a fully human response to any situation, when we could be fully absorbed in the world as human beings. But more often now, people don’t get to see the whole situation, but only some small part of it. Some sort of direction from on high.

I call this the agentic state. The individual yields to authority, and in doing so becomes alienated from his own actions. The person has a choice. He or she chooses to become agentic. But once you assume the role, it’s almost impossible to go back. Published in May of this year by the Global Government Technology Center in Berlin, a proxy of the World Economic Forum, the agentic state white paper outlines how agentic AI will revamp 10 functional layers of public administration. The white paper states that in an era increasingly characterized by poly crisis, interconnected and cascading shocks ranging from pandemics and extreme weather events to cyber physical attacks, financial instability, disinformation campaigns and even conventional warfare.

Traditional crisis management models are under strain. Threat actors are already adapting. With AI, they can automate, scale and personalize attacks at unprecedented speed. Governments, by contrast, are often still operating with institutional reflexes shaped for a slower, more linear world. One of the main proposals is something called simulation infrastructure, where every individual is given a virtual twin, and everything we do will be analyzed and simulated with the idea that these simulations can be used for knowing the future actions of an individual or a group. The report claims that when a crisis begins to unfold, AI initiates the first steps in crisis response before human in-the-loop structures have time to react.

These agents will work alongside increasingly autonomous physical systems, such as drones and robots, forming the backbone of a responsive, adaptive crisis infrastructure. Co-founder of Oracle AI, Larry Ellison, explains how this might look in the near future. The police will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording, watching and recording everything that’s going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on. And it’s unimpeachable. It’s not people that are looking at those cameras. It’s AI that’s looking at the camera. No, no, no. You can’t do this.

A drone goes out there. They’re way faster than a police car. There’s no reason for, by the way, high-speed chases. You shouldn’t have high-speed chases between cars. You just have a drone follow the car. I mean, it’s very, very simple. And the new generation of autonomous drones. And who are you, little fella? Come to show them where I am. Not nice. Greg Reese reporting. The Reese Report is now fully funded by my Substack subscribers. Subscribe today and support my work at gregreese.substack.com. [tr:trw].