Delegate the task, keep the judgment

There are two parts to most work: the doing and the deciding. The doing is drafting the email, sorting the list, pulling the figures. The deciding is what matters here, what to ignore, whose interest wins when two of them conflict. You can hand an AI the first part wholesale. The second part is the one only you can own.

The trap is subtle because it feels like efficiency. The AI offers a recommendation, and accepting it saves a few minutes of thought — so you accept. Do that enough times and you've stopped deciding without ever choosing to stop. The effort you saved was the judgment itself. That's the line between handing over a task and handing over yourself, and it's the same reason Autonomy is not the same as agency.

Keeping judgment is also how you use AI honestly: you weigh its output instead of deferring to it, because Trust is a calibrated forecast, not a feeling, not a default setting. Done right, the machine does the volume and you do the deciding — which is exactly the bargain in Augmenting a person beats automating the task.

See more on agency and autonomy.

Next: tell the two apart with Autonomy is not the same as agency.