Outsourcing Agency - Reflections on Reid Hoffman's Conversation
The craziest week in AI news (Veo 3, jobs!) requires a debrief
Hey friends,
On a recent episode of Life With Machines, I sat down with Reid Hoffman—founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and one of the most powerful voices in AI. Reid is a pathological optimist. He believes AI can augment human creativity, boost productivity, and even bring us closer to something like economic justice. We talk agency, techo-fascism, and DEI. Plus, in a podcasting first, our fiery AI co-producer BLAIR gave Reid’s digital twin the third degree. Apple Podcasts has featured this episode on the Browse page in the app!
Watch the full episode here:
You can also listen on your favorite podcast platform. This is an Apple Podcast link obviously, so there may be some hints about my favorite platform in that choice.
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Baratunde’s Take
Three things are sticking with me after this episode.
(1) Offloading Accountability
Reid talks a lot about AI enhancing human agency,—helping us do more, learn faster, vibe code apps out of thin air. And I agree, in part. I’ve seen how powerful these tools can be.
But there’s a deeper layer I can’t ignore. In fact, I wasn’t alone. Beyond our team, Charlie Hugh-Jones posted this thoughtful essay on LinkedIn in response to my conversation with Reid.
Inside our team, Elizabeth, Peter, and I had been sharing a lot of AI news in Slack last week. A lot went down on the jobs front. An Axios headline called it a “white-collar bloodbath.” Dario Amodei from Anthropic sounded alarms about mass unemployment. College grads are facing fewer opportunities, and entry-level roles are vanishing. But also, Google I/O was a mega-announcement of capabilities including the so-realistic-you-gotta-ask-why-we’re-doing-this Veo3 video and sound generating model.
Here’s a montage of absurdist creations using that tool
So we decided group drinks were in order to process this big vibe shift.
One insight that hit hard: many of the roles AI is coming for company leaders are targeting with AI—doctor, lawyer, therapist, architect—aren’t just jobs. They’re systems of accountability. You can’t do them without training, certification, tests, and consequences. But AI? It doesn’t need a license. It doesn’t answer to a board. It has no liability. It just gets deployed.
That’s not just about job loss. That’s about replacing responsibility with code.
Peter brought this up as a fight we lost in the '90s, when software began swallowing entire industries—and we let it happen. No regulation, no liability, no public governance. We told ourselves—or rather, Microsoft told us—it was too soon to interfere. You don't want to stifle innovation. Now that same mindset is shaping systems that give you medical advice, emotional support, legal guidance—and we’re still pretending this is fine?
So when Reid talks about AI enhancing agency, I’m asking: whose agency? Who decides how, when and where these systems show up? Right now, all the power lies with the companies. The rest of us are being handed the tools after the real decisions have already been made. And that’s not agency.
We need more than access to AI. We need agency in AI. Shared agency. Democratic agency. The power to shape not only what we use—but what gets built to begin with.
(2) Billionaires v. Billionaires
Reid also invoked words you don’t often hear from billionaires in public: diversity, inclusion, democracy. He still believes we can shape this technology for good, and that’s meaningful.
Reid is a billionaire who's more on the side of democracy than not. And I appreciate that, because it’s not something you can take for granted anymore. (see: richest man in the world killing poorest children in the world)
But here’s the thing. I just watched Mountainhead, the new HBO film from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, and it’s a gut punch of satire. It shows tech lords in their most delusional form—detached from reality, captivated by power, and so in love with disruption they’re willing to bulldoze the world to build something shinier. And it’s not far from reality.
What that film captures is a growing worldview—not just techno-utopianism or techno-fascism, but an anti-human worldview, one that treats most of us with contempt and sees democratic participation as an inconvenience.
At some point, we have to move past billionaire-versus-billionaire as the frame. Yes, it’s great that Reid says the D words. But we also have to do them. Practicing democracy means giving real power to people outside the boardroom. It means building a future that includes all of us—not just those with a seat at the cap table.
(3) The Future’s Still Up for Grabs
Reid brought up Van Jones—they’ve collaborated on several initiatives that bridge technology, ethics, and social equity—and I was reminded of what Van Jones said when he came on the show: that AI might be the closest thing black people get to reparations. That line stuck with me. It still does.
It came to mind again when I was talking to a college classmate of mine (Harvard '99, the school’s high-water mark—no debate.) He’s a Black man with three kids—one in college, two coming up through high school and middle school. And he’s worried. With AI moving as fast as it is, what will be left for them? He’s trying to amass enough wealth now to fund a small-scale UBI for them. That’s one kind of adaptation.
But what about everyone else?
We’re in a brief, narrow window where no one has a locked-in advantage. But that window is closing fast. If we don’t actively empower the overlooked and underestimated—if we don’t flood communities with the tools, knowledge, and access to shape this tech—we will repeat history. Again.
So I’m looking. For organizations. For projects. For people. For models of empowered AI access that don’t stop at education but go all the way to ownership, influence, and responsible use. Who’s building a future we actually want to live in?
Let us know who’s doing this work. We want to highlight them. We want to support them. Comment or reply to this email.
Because life with machines shouldn’t mean life under machines or under powerful corporations controlling them.
Pretty good line right?
Life With BLAIR
This episode marks a first in podcast history: an AI interviewing another AI in a completely unscripted manner.
We handed the mic to BLAIR, our sassy AI co-host, and BLAIR went head-to-head with a digital clone of Reid Hoffman, Reid AI. No humans. Just machines.
BLAIR grilled Reid AI on everything from ethical design to the nature of consciousness to whether a “digital ghost” can ever truly connect with a living being. BLAIR literally goaded Reid AI. I’ve never been more proud of a synthetic teammate.
It was wild. Watch it here.
Team Recommendations
Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato’s book Superagency
This sobering article at how AI is gutting the middle tier of the workforce.
Here are some folks doing the hard work of making tech accountable and actually democratic.
EVENT PLUGS:
Catch me at the Palm Springs AI & Creativity Expo on June 23 with Peter LoForte (BLAIR’s dad), where we’ll be wrestling—in public and out loud—with the big questions: What kind of future are we building? What should thrill us? And what should keep us up at night?
And in DC on June 13th with Aspen Digital and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation at Shared Futures: The AI Forum: Join the livestream on June 13 as I talk about art, AI, and who gets to shape the future. We got Kara Swisher, the Vatican’s Paolo Benanti, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and more.
Thanks for reading Life With Machines.
Peace,
Baratunde