On Agents and Agency

Hands enter, repeat a gesture, drift out of unison, and meet again. Each movement is both an action and a record of that action. Robots now learn from records like these. My guess, and it is only a guess: the work of human hands earns something like fifteen trillion dollars a year. Recordings of that work are bought for a few dollars an hour, sometimes for nothing, then copied into every machine that follows. Paid once and kept forever, the know-how of the hand is going for pennies on the dollar.