Reid Hoffman on AI ‘Superagency’

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/ef689005696c266c

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Would you rather have an a radiologist read your X-ray scan, or would you rather have a radiologist with an AI read your X ray scan? And the answer is
Radiologist with AI.
Every day of the week.
Eight days of the week.
Because
Not then.
gives me a much better health outcome.
And so
The society that you experience.
In this kind of superagency.
is when many people get the same superpowers you know all together
and we're all benefiting from our own and from others.
That's Reed Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and founding host of Masters of Scale.
Reed is always instructive to talk with, especially about AI, which she has ardently championed as a founder, as a Microsoft board member, and as an author.
He's just released a new book called Super Agency about the fast evolving AI era.
Today we dig into it, so let's get started.
I'm Bob Sapphian.
And this
is rapid response.
I'm Bob Safe and I'm here with Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Graylock.
Founding host of Masters of Scale. Reed, great to see you.
Great to see you as always.
So you have a a new book out today called Super Agency with co author Greg Biado.
Some people have called the book a surprisingly positive take on AI and on humanity. And I think the surprise is less about you being optimistic than about the topic, that there's so much skepticism right now about the future of both AI and of humanity.

Can you start first by defining the word agency, regular old agency, and then sort of what superagency is beyond that?
So agency
is our ability to kind of express ourselves in the world to make choices to configure our environment
uh to say, you know, this is kind of what I want to have happen uh to me, to my environment around me. And obviously nobody has infinite agency, but we all have some agency and we aspire to that as part of what we do.
AI
like other kind of general purpose technologies that have come before.
Gives us superpowers.
And superpowers are like you know, a car give you superpower for mobility, you know, the phone give you superpowers for kinda connectivity and information.
And AI gives you superpowers for kind of the entire world of kind of information navigation, decisioning, et cetera.
And what super agency is is not just when you as an individual.
Get the superpower.
But when
You and
Many of the people around you, when millions of people throughout society also get that superpower because
Just as a car.
doesn't you know transforms your mobility, your ability to go somewhere.
When other people's mobility are are are are similarly transformed, like a doctor can come to a house call, a friend can come visit.
And and so the the society that you experience
In this kind of superagency is when many people get the same superpowers and we're all benefiting from our own and from others.
I mean the the fears around AI, I guess, are that AI will eventually limit human control. And when you're talking about superagency, you're sort of positing the opposite that we're gonna have
More control.
Well it's actually different, but more in some important ways. These technological transformations of agency never are only additive. They're mostly additive. Like the car
is broadly additive.
But of course then, you know, if your agency was previously that you were a driver of a horse carriage, you know, that agency changes. Like, you know, when you have a phone, you can reach out to other people, but yet other people can also reach out to you, so you're available. So so agency kind of transforms in these cases. And
You can already see it if you start playing with these agents.
That you can say, Hey, I can actually now do things and accomplish things.
That I couldn't accomplish before.
And then unlocks
My ability to learn things, my ability to communicate things, my ability to do things faster in more interesting ways. And so that's part of the reason why it's really important.
That we actually
play with these technologies, we engage with them, we do serious things with them. We do what I'm in the book I call it iterative deployment.
And I think that's what is so important.
for us all engaging.
on this path heading towards superagency.
You talk about

kinds of superagency or two different tracks in some ways. One
is where AI helps me complete tasks that otherwise would be hard for me to do alone.
And the other is where AI does things
For me, without me.
You might say
When you're getting into an Uber.
Is this a gain of agency or a loss of agency? Because you say, Well, you're not driving anymore.
But of course because you're choosing it and because you're engaging in it.
it actually you gain ener uh agency because you didn't have to have to have the car there. You could be have drunk a little you know one or two cocktails too many, and you you still have the mobility. So
The the mindset is important because if you kind of said, I am getting an Uber because I hate it and because I've got a stranger who's driving me to some other different place and I don't really want to be doing it, it's equivalent of like, you know, I'm being carted off to jail.
then of course you're gonna have this enormous
you know, s uh perception and decrease in agency, but like if you adopt it with the right mindset and kind of say, hey
This is something that I am seeking to do, I'm trying to do.
Then obviously you begin
going from negative to positive to curious
Think about the first time you're on a bike, right? You're kind of terrified of it. You're like, do I really need to be learning this? You know, you got training wheels on.
But
Once you begin to learn it, you go, ah.
I now have increased mobility, I can have new exercise, I can I can get new experiences. And that's the kind of thing of leaning into that agency is I think really important.
As we adopt
New technologies.
Yeah, and I guess trusting that agency. I mean, your your example about the Uber driver, it it makes me think about like I'm giving agency over to the driver, but the driver is probably giving agency over to a a maps app that is telling them the best way to get to my destination, right? And they're trusting the map and I'm trusting that
that they're trusting the map and all those things sort of lay on top of each other.
Yeah, and actually I wouldn't say giving over agency,'cause you always uh have some agency
in that choice and ongoing, but like you're utilizing
You're engaging.
The agency. Well, I'm I'm offloading some mental load from myself, right? And allowing to spend my time doing something that I feel like is more valuable.
Yeah, exactly. One of the very earliest things when I was saying
Why do we want autonomous vehicles? It's drinking and driving.
goes from
A horrific
act of negligent or deliberate evil.
Two
Something that might be actually quite relaxing and enjoyable.
You've been
Preaching about the potential of AI.
For some time, you wrote a book with ChatGPT to demonstrate the potential. You've made digital twins of yourself to try demystifying it.
Not everyone is convinced. What what do you feel like you have to sort of fight most in getting people over this? And and and what what prompted you to do the book?
now as a way to try to make that change.
Well the book is kind of an a natural
extension from Impromptu. So Impromptu, first book on AI, co written with AI.
Trying to show how it's amplification intelligence.
And how you could use it in these positive cases. My biggest hope and persuasion
Is it people who are
AI fearful or AI skeptical.
may begin to add some AI curiosity.
You kind of say, Hey, look, I should
Try to play with this. I should try to see this.
Um
Part of what super agency is about is to say.
Okay.
Does it just matter?
For yourself.
But it's other people.
Get
this exposure to this that the other people's getting exposure will also be good for your life. So for example
If you think about
The fact that like I have a smartphone, I have a medical assistant
that is, you know, good or better than the average doctor.
Would you rather have an a radiologist read your X ray scan or would you rather have a radiologist with an AI?
Read your excription. And the answer is
Radiologies with an AI.
Every day of the week.
Eight days in the week.
Not then.
gives me a much better health outcome.
So it's not just me.
And my superpowers, but other people giving the superpowers also help me.
Even if I'm not
Engage in quite the way you would uh like me to most. I'm still gonna get some of the benefit of this. It's gonna be part of a cultural
Changes.
Yeah, and I think that's ultimately how people get to adopting
And and you know, kind of adapting their lifestyle.
to these new technologies'cause they begin to see, oh, actually in fact
This is a new very good thing. And as opposed to like, for example, when cars were first introduced, they were considered of them to be so dangerous that I had to have a person walking in front of them waving an orange flag.
Now I think we got rid of that regulation uh very quickly. And I was like, Okay, well they're dangerous, but okay, can we contain and shape the danger in ways that are small.
relative to this massive benefit of superagency and mobility.
Hm. I you know, when I think about you, Reed, it's like you have these
Different
slices of audience of across your influence. Like you've got
Your own peers in tech, and then you've got business people and entrepreneurs.
Who aren't in the tech and AI space. It's not their core competency. And I wonder w when you're constructing this book, are you thinking about each of those groups like separately and hoping to get
different reactions from each of them out of it.
Well
There's two primary groups.
in broad category that I'm writing to. The the first and the foremost is the people who are
skeptical, AI uncertain, AI fearful.
NSA.
This is why.
You should add
AI Curious.
And I uh hopeful.
It doesn't mean
That I'm gonna persuade in one fell book.
You know.
all of this skepticism or uncertainty or fear to go away.
But to add that in and to begin to see that if
You know, the only way that you can get to the kind of future that you
uh want to get to is when you steer towards a positive future. You can't get to the future you want, but just trying to eliminate the future you don't want.
And so
And you can eliminate a future you don't want, but you eliminate a lot of other futures too, including a lot of good ones. And so that's the the thing of getting to that good future.
Now
That's
My primary group.
Secondarily, it's actually also for technologists, companies that are building these new technologies say
Look, what are they?
concerns that people have, the concerns around jobs, the concerns around misinformation, the concerns around privacy, they all kind of come back to kind of concerns around agency.
And so if you then become a
technological builder, developer, iterator.
etc. With a focus on how do you enhance
Human agency.
That is a design lens.
I think is actually in fact really important. And so that's reason why that's the second group.
And this design lens for technologists.
It's not necessarily that like, oh I shouldn't design something'cause it might
Реплессоманс.
But to be mindful that if there's a way to
Design it so that it augments a job instead of replacing a job.
To make that choice?
Well or
To always be thinking about how would I do that? Could I do that here?
Et cetera. And it doesn't mean don't do replacement.'Cause for example
There's a lot of jobs the where we have human beings
You know, kind of trying to act like robots, like customer service following following a script. And robots will do that better.
Um we want to create
New jobs that are essentially
Human jobs.
Where you might have
you know, a little bit more agency, a little bit more creativity, a little bit more ability to express yourself, et cetera, versus just following the script.
is the kind of thing that we want to create a lot more of those.
Yeah.
Acting on its own seems to be what
scares people the most, you know, about but I I've thought that like the likelihood that I'm gonna lose my job to an AI alone.
It may happen at some point, but I'm more likely now to lose my job to someone who uses AI better than I do, right? Although
If I'm losing my job it maybe doesn't matter that much either way, which one I'm losing it to.

Yeah, so part of the thing that I love about thinking about technology is whenever you think there's a problem, including a problem created by technology, you think about can technology be a solution?
And so yes, I do think
That a lot of jobs will then start being
Requiring use of AI and AI agents.
as part of being professional. It's a little bit like if you said, Hey, I'm a professional today and I don't use a computer or I don't use a smartphone. It's like
No, not really.
Good luck getting that job. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So there are technological requirements which increase with new tool sets for doing jobs, and AI is definitely gonna be one of those.
Now.
That being said
part of the solution you go, Oh my God, am I gonna be out of job it's like
Well actually in fact and this gets back to the you know kind of
the book being for technologists and thing about human agency is like
Well, how do we help people have their agency of learning the new skills?
And saying hey, yes, my my
Job is gonna be taken over by a human using an AI.
Well.
How about that human be me?
Or
You know, okay, so this particular one doesn't work, but how can the AI help me find a different job?
In many ways I think we will naturally get there.
But I think I'm not going to be able to
You know.
Just because we'll naturally get there doesn't mean we can't get there.
Better.
by being intentional on having design. So it's one of the reasons I identify myself as a bloomer in the book versus a zoomer, because I actually don't think
That
You know, uh everything will just be great with the technology. I think we actually have to steer it some intentionally, because
When human beings encounter new general purpose technologies
As early as the printing press, all the rest of them
All kinds of
Like
We handle the transition of the new technologies.
Badly.
And part of the reason why I'm doing this book
This podcast.
These things like this is try to say, let's do this transition much better. It doesn't mean it won't be with without s there will be suffering and transition. It's like, Well, I don't wanna be learning the new job. I don't wanna be learning the new tool. And it's like, Well, unfortunately you're gonna have to.
Right.
But if you embrace it with some agency
You know, we can possibly make that
Both less painful?
and have more opportunities. We are entering into the cognitive industrial revolution, and all you have to do is look at any simple books about the industrial revolution to recognize transitions can be painful.
Let's do these ones better.
Reed may not be a zoomer when it comes to AI, but he's always been a techno optimist. That tech is an essential tool in creating a better future, and he definitely feels that way about AI. So how do we handle the risks and trouble spots with today's AI, and how might the Trump administration impact things? We'll talk about that after.
After the break, stay with us.
Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies.
Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?
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This is Rapid Response and I'm Bob Sapian.
Before the break, we heard Reed Hoffman talk about what he means by superagency, which is the title of a new book he just released. Now he shares his vision of what an AI-infused workday will soon look like, how we can address the risks and trouble spots with the latest AI developments, plus what the first week of the Trump administration indicates about.
our tech and business future. Let's jump back in.
Some of the technologies in recent years that
We've all gotten really excited about, you know, social media and smartphones. We sort of underestimated the societal impact, right? The wow factor gave way to these consequences that we that we didn't foresee. Filter bubbles or too many hours of screen time. How much do you think
This sort of alarm about AI is because
Of that recent history.
I think we always hit alarm.
when we hit new technology. So I don't think it's just because
You know, the concern around social networks and information flows and children and other things which are very
you know kind of legitimate concerns.
And in issues that need to be addressed.
But also
We would have hit it anyway.
even if wasn't there. I mean, we had all these concerns. I mean, you you and I are old enough to remember, you know, all the description around the internet about how, you know, it was kind of like
A terrible place, cyberspace, very dangerous. You know, who would ever want to upload their credit card and buy something that's probably full of criminals and frauds and and dangerous people.
Well,
There still isn't much about information on the internet.
But
There's also a bunch of really good information. I mean, the kinds of things you can find with Wikipedia and broadcases.
Listening to random podcasts of these two guys talking to each other. You know, there they're there's there's all of the stuff that that that actually can be quite good.
In some ways, when new technology comes in, like the best parts of it
We get used to so quickly. Like
The world never existed without this before.
You know, can you imagine if I needed to have a paper map to get around? Like I wouldn't even know how to move myself through the world.
And and then those trouble things pop up, and I guess that's why you you wanna keep iterating and improving, because those trouble spots will always pop up.
Look the trouble saw pop up whether or not we have new technology or not.
And you know, as as you know, one of the chapters in the book is innovation and safety. Yeah, people always think innovation is just change and risk but actually in fact, you know, you create the car.
And part of the reason like, you know, we now have cars that you can drive at
you know, fifty miles an hour, sixty miles an hour, seventy miles an hour on the highway is'cause we innovated on safety in brakes, safety in car construction, safety in seat belts. You know, and that
that the which things to iterate on or which things to do, you only really discover
By going down the road.
You can't
Sit before you create the car and
and invent all the things. There's no way to do that.
And so that's why the iterative deployment and engagement and getting
millions of people to engage is so important.
To how we create these things in ways that help us.
As a society and as humanity.
Hm. So do you have a vision of what
like super agency mode would look like in a so called average day for a US professional on the job. Like do you have a do you have a vision about what that day looks like? What happens?
Look, I think
That what will happen in relatively short order of years.
We will be using co pilots.
To help us.
Say Bob, you and I were meeting in person.
It would be odd.
If I put the phone on the canner, put on the a agent and just have the agent note taking
you know, suggesting certain things in the conversation and so forth.
I think that will become
Typical.
It may not become typical when, hey, what we're doing is we're just talking about
the vacations that each of us had or something else and that kind of thing.
But whenever we're working.
or wherever we're having conversation with some kind of goal in earnest.
I think we'll do that.
If there are areas that you are worried about with AI
Like what are the ones that are sharpest? I mean I I I'm thinking about something I read recently, I think it was in Axios about
sort of the national security implications, whether it's
military or whether it's information security
Or whether it's code breaking, you know, um
Are are those
Areas that you get more
Anxious about.
I'm less worried about the the AI by itself. There's obviously a bunch of like Hollywood things like terminator robots and so forth.
But the AI is since it gives you superpowers.
It also gives rogue state superpowers, terrorist superpowers, criminal superpowers. And so I'm worried about the you know, and and by the way, all of them have an incentive to to to adopt early experiment with it and so forth.
And so I'm worried about, you know, how do we navigate that. And that's one of the reasons why
You know, I
you know, help advise a whole bunch of governments, you know, kind of help set up
you know, kind of safety and alignment conferences, uh talks between the various
providers of and builders of artificial intelligence, and that that's another area I think of worry.
And while I
I think you know, this kind of category of Doomer of existential risk. Oh, someone gonna build terminators, you know, either
autonomous or with humans and
you know, present a human uh an existential risk. I think that
AI is much more naturally gonna reduce the number of humanity's existential risk, pandemics, asteroids, other things, even as it is.
But even as
Such as that is, I think it's important to
To say, well, what should our be our
international global treaties on
the use of autonomous weapons on
You know, kind of building
Yeah, kind of killer robots.
And what other things we should do there.
In order to have
The deck century the best human century.
And I guess you want
technologists at the table when those discussions are happening because they
understand
better than anyone you know, what's practical and what and what might unfold. But at the same time
You don't want just technologists at that table.
Oh, for sure not. Part of you know what we covered in superagency is this kind of notion as
Look, part of how technology develops is not just an individual tech company.
with some potential regulatory body.
You know, part of what makes company tech companies do this well is they have all you know, growing network of customers.
They have a network of
of investors, they have a network of employees and their families. You know, there's a whole stack of these interlocking networks that create what we call the consent to the government. And I think that
it's important to have that kind of broad participation, hence, you know, iterative development. And you know, I myself
you know, while my undergraduate degree was artificial intelligence, my master's degree is in philosophy, and I think if anything, AI
Brings out
the importance of humanity degrees
When you think about
you know, well, how should it be designed? How should we interact with it?
you know, what should be the kinds of things in our agency focus of increasing our superagency.
And these are I think kinds of considerations that
Yeah.
A humanities education can be very helpful for.
It's a little early, but
New administration in Washington.

That
administration how they'll look at AI or whether their regulatory environment will be
Any different, any change.
Well
No news to our listeners. I was putting a lot of energy into
You know, electing Harris versus Trump.
But I think that there's a earnestness around the fact that AI really matters and that there's people
who are specifically appointed
from the very beginning of administration in order to navigate
One of the phrases that I've been
you know, starting to use a lot more as American intelligence. How do we make that American intelligence? And so
That's you know, building on the CHIPS Act, but um then also in the new administration, you know, kind of
Making a
А масов сіф.
Of
regulation for provisioning new energy, provisioning nuclear energy, provisioning data centers.
So I think all of that.
has a lot of good potential.
And so part of you know
What I'm trying to do is
Help.
the country build on that potential and you know
Build things that really help.
American citizens.
As a group.
I had a guest on Rapid Response recently talking about the impulse by
Some businesses and brands to sort of go quiet.
early in an administration to be paralyzed to some extent by the uncertain
ground rules and guardrails and repercussions.
Do you have advice about how business leaders should act?
Around this
inflection point we're in right now.
The short answer is it's high volatility.
And you know, y all you have to do is look around the world. It's not just kind of
Various conflicts.
But also obviously we have a lot of turmoil.
In the country.
Voted for
Trump over Harris. It's like
You know, less than two million
People. You've got you know kind of a divided country in various ways. What that means.
for your business leaders is expect more volatility. Expect more
crisis. Expect more.
uncertainty.
folks is look, there may be great opportunities here. Th a bunch of
of of smart deregulation.
uh may op open up opportunities like nuclear energy or other things.
But also
the the questions around the uncertainty also creates a lot of volatility. So you should be
Kind of protective on that. And that's that's the advice that I'm
I'm giving folks.
Well, Reed, this has been great, as always. I love hearing the way you're thinking about it and the things you're doing. And thanks for taking the time. And I look forward to doing it again.
Yes, me too, and Bob. Always a pleasure.

Whenever I talk to Reed about AI, I always come away excited and also a little chastened.
In part it's his acknowledgement of the risks, which I tend not to want to think about.
But also his encouragement to engage personally with AI in our work life. I'm reminded that I could experiment more, should experiment more. I'm definitely talking a lot about AI, but I could put more into action.
Reed's observations about volatility from tech changes, from political changes, that hits home.
We all need to be as adaptive as possible, and new AI tools can only help.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.

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