CONCEPT
Superagency
Reid Hoffman's argument that widely accessible AI gives every person the cognitive leverage previously available only to teams and institutions — a democratization of capability comparable in scope to mass literacy.
Superagency is the proposition advanced by
Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato in their 2025 book of the same name: that artificial intelligence, widely and equitably deployed, will expand rather than contract human capacity — giving every person access to the kind of help that was previously the province of teams, institutions, and elites. A lawyer for every person. A doctor for every person. A tutor for every person. A strategist for every person. The argument is not that AI replaces humans but that it democratizes access to the cognitive leverage that determined outcomes in professional life, redistributing capability the way mass literacy redistributed reading, personal computing redistributed data processing, and web browsers redistributed information access. Each of those redistributions produced losses — scribes lost their monopoly, mainframe operators lost their priesthood — but the aggregate gains in human capacity were, in Hoffman's reading, so large that the losses were eclipsed on long enough horizons. Superagency expects AI to follow this arc, and expects the timeline to