Isaacson: Agentic AI risks separating technology from human creativity and control

Asked whether AI needs its own “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson recalled Jobs’s view of a computer as a “bicycle for the mind”: it should augment human abilities, not replace them. Isaacson said a new introduction to his book The Innovators, due out that week, addresses this question directly. He traced the tradition from Ada Lovelace through J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay to Jobs: in his account, technology should connect human creativity with the processing power of machines.

Isaacson said he was comfortable using Claude but worried about autonomous agents that act without people and could get out of their control. He believes Jobs would have been appalled by systems not closely connected to human creativity and not directed toward helping humanity.

Another participant countered that today’s agents still start from a human idea: he had not seen a product or marketing material whose seed idea came from AI. In his view, models do not yet generate ideas as people do, though he expects they will eventually. Isaacson allowed that he might be right, but added that a launched agent could act with its own agency and potentially get out of control. That was a concern, not a claim that current agents are already autonomous or out of control.