Agentic AI Is Myth Set in Motion

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi argue in the Economist that AI is not an emerging individual intelligence but a "condensate of human culture"—a statistical summary of Jacques Barzun's "House of Intellect" that, when paired with software "harnesses," can act out narratives in the digital world, such as checking proofs in Lean or joining a hacking attack. Farrell compares LLMs to oral bards who learn underlying structures and tropes rather than memorizing epics, and cites Shanahan et al.'s view of models as non-deterministic simulators maintaining a superposition of simulacra. Brad DeLong adds further proposed differences between humans and models, including that LLMs do not learn while consulted, weight sources by frequency rather than trust, and lack the practical, unwritten knowledge humans use.