the environment Is the agent — draft for feedback, and looking for collaborators

I've written a draft paper and I'd like feedback on it. It came out of the learnings & engagements in this group, so this is the right place to put it first.

Some context on where I'm coming from. I hold a PhD in anthropology and sociology, a post-doc from the London Business School and after I was not able to pursue my academic career (no position, family life), I pvioted into AI and spent the last four years working in AI, currently leading AI governance inside an international humanitarian organisation. Between the fieldwork and the AI work there has been a fair amount of drift, and I have nothing published on any of this yet. Writing is how I think, so this got written alongside the practice it describes.

The argument in one sentence: agentic capability is a property of the arrangement of model, task and environment, and the half no vendor can sell you is the environment, which for organisational work is a description of your own organisation. How work actually gets done, which rules apply, where the knowledge sits, what must never happen. Most of that has never been written down, and it can't be commissioned from outside, because the people who hold it are the people doing the work.

ICM is in there, named and engaged with.

It's 26 pages. Read whatever is useful. Feel free to drop the PDF into your own workspace and have Claude go at it, which is a fair test of the thing, and I'd rather see a hard read than a kind one.

Thank you. Also open to any future collaborations.

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the environment Is the agent — draft for feedback, and looking for collaborators