But what I am worried about is that as humans are outpaced and rendered obsolete in the most parts of cognitive labour, the incentives to maintain the institutions and practices that strengthen our minds so that we can even have the imagined intent, taste and capacity to wisely steer vastly more intelligent machines, will fade. A myriad of questions seem unanswered to me: Where will the human’s purpose come from? Through what experience will his taste have matured? What will enable him to recognise that the advice he receives is mistaken, or that the goal he has chosen is unworthy of pursuit? To separate our capacity to decide and exercise “agency” from our ability to think seems to me like making the old educational error in a more radical form. Educational reformers once imagined that knowledge and memorisation could be ignored, while at the same time leaving something called “critical thinking” intact. We are now being asked to believe that thinking itself can be handed over while human agency somehow would somehow survive untouched. But agency is not an abstract faculty floating free of everything else we do. Our purposes are inextricably linked to our acquisition of knowledge, to our thinking. Agency, considered in the abstract, tells us little about what a person will do with it. Someone intelligent and well-read may devote extraordinary energy to building a library that enlarges the lives of his compatriots, while someone unintelligent and indoctrinated by religious extremism might use their agency to wage jihad against infidels. Not only that: by delegating the work of understanding, we may also relinquish some of the means through which we discover what is worth doing. The promise that humans will supply the goals while machines do the thinking treats our purposes as though they were already fully formed, awaiting the means of execution.