The idea at the center of the book
The Agency
Window
The stretch of time in which human choices still shape what AI becomes, before the defaults harden and the room to steer quietly disappears.
it is open now ↓
Open. Keep scrolling.
It is open now.
Right now, the way AI fits into how we work, learn, heal, create, and govern is still unsettled. The capabilities are arriving fast, but the habits, the norms, and the rules around them are not yet fixed. That gap, between what the technology can do and what we have decided it should do, is the window. It is the most leverage we will ever have.
It closes quietly.
The window does not slam. It narrows, a sliver at a time, every time we treat the outcome as already decided. Defaults get set. Systems get wired a certain way. A thousand small, reasonable choices accumulate into a shape no one chose on purpose, and undoing it gets harder each year. Nothing goes wrong. It just drifts.
It is a measure, not a clock.
This is the part that matters, and the part that is hopeful. The Agency Window is not a countdown someone else is running. It is a measure of how much say we still have. It is wide when we are paying attention and making deliberate choices, and it shrinks when we stop. Which means it is not something that happens to us. It is something we hold open.
What it asks of you.
Not panic, and not blind faith. It asks for the opposite of drift: to notice where AI is being wired into your work and your home, and to make a choice instead of accepting the default. The book turns that into a single question you can ask on any ordinary Tuesday. What would you do differently, as a professional, a parent, a citizen, if you took the window seriously?
The technology is not the variable. The choices are. And the window for making them is open, for now.
Use the window
The World After AI is an argument for using the Agency Window while it is open. It lands in April 2027. Sign up and you will hear first.