AI didn’t take your agency.
You handed it over.

What she actually said

Ressa describes three waves. Social media captured our attention and polarised us. Chatbots now work on our need for intimacy. Agentic AI will act on its own. Her ask is regulation: hold the companies accountable for documented harm, restrict children’s access, build public platforms outside Big Tech, and “remove the addictive features, not just for teenagers, but for all of us.”

She has earned the right to say it. She spent years watching disinformation on social platforms tear at her own country. None of what follows questions her experience. I question one word in her conclusion: lose.

Agency is handed over, not taken

Malaysia has 30.7 million active social media identities — about 85% of the population. Most of us carry the same apps on the same phones. Out of that identical setup come two kinds of people. Some use the feed to learn a trade, find customers and build a business. Others lose three hours a night and cannot say where they went.

The machine is the same in both cases. The difference is the person using it.

I work with AI all day. It writes, drafts, checks and builds for me. It has never once decided what I do with my hour. Every notification can be switched off. Every feed has a close button. No chatbot can keep talking to someone who has put the phone down.

So when I read that AI will take our agency, I ask a different question: who handed it over, and why do we keep blaming the tool? Blaming the tool is comfortable, because it takes the decision away from the person. Television was going to rot our brains. Video games were going to raise a violent generation. Each time, the people who set their own terms came out fine, and the ones who did not blamed the box.

Darwin, quoted correctly

I believe natural selection still applies to people. But it is worth getting the famous line right. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptable” is usually credited to Darwin. He never wrote it. It comes from a 1963 paraphrase by Leon Megginson, a management professor, and his exact wording is: “it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives.”

That matters, because this selection has nothing to do with who is clever. Clever people lose nights to feeds too. What gets selected is habit: who treats attention as a budget, and who treats it as free. The environment changed when the feed arrived, and again when the chatbot learned to sound like a friend. The people who adjusted their behaviour will pull away from the people who did not. I made the same argument in Wheelchair or Gym. — the tool does not decide; the way you use it does.

To be fair: choice needs an adult

On two points, Ressa is right and I am not.

First, children. My argument assumes someone who can choose, and a twelve-year-old is not that person yet. Even the industry concedes it: Character.AI stopped open-ended chat for users under 18 in November 2025. Malaysia’s own under-16 social media restriction, under the Online Safety Act 2025, is due to take effect this year. Protecting children is not paternalism. It is what adults are for.

Second, the fight is not even. The features I tell you to switch off were built by large teams paid on how long you stay. That is a real asymmetry, and holding companies to account for documented harm is fair.

Where I part from her is the step after that. When adults are regulated for their own attention, the decision moves from the person to the state. That is the same loss of agency — only with a different owner.

Three questions I would ask of any app

If you want your agency back, you do not need a law. Ask three questions of every app that takes your time.

1. Who set this default? Autoplay, infinite scroll and notifications are someone else’s decisions until you change them.

2. What does it want from me? A free product that wants your hours has already told you what you are.

3. What did I get from the last hour? A skill, a customer, a decision — or nothing. Count it the way you would count money.

The same questions apply to AI at work. If a model is producing output for you, it is a tool. If it has become the thing you talk to because it always agrees, that is the second wave Ressa describes — and the fix is still in your hand. I wrote about the other side of this in I Sell AI. Yesterday’s Outage Still Sent My Team Home. A team that cannot work without the tool has already handed over more than it meant to.

The bottom line

AI will make it easier than ever to give your attention away, and harder to notice you have done it. That is a reason to be deliberate, not a reason to be told what to do. Protect the children. Hold the companies to their harms. For everyone else, agency is not something the machine takes. It is something you hand over, one default at a time — and the people who stop handing it over will be the ones who come out ahead.

If you disagree, and plenty of people will, I am happy to argue it out over coffee.