You can't grant autonomy to a ghost. I keep asking for more autonomy from AI systems while giving them no way to prove they've earned it.

You can't grant autonomy to a ghost.

I keep asking for more autonomy from AI systems while giving them no way to prove they've earned it.

There's the orchestration layer. The brain. The decision layer. Three different intelligences, maybe more.

I rarely know which one I'm actually talking to at any moment.

How do you build trust with something you can't identify? You don't. You just pretend the whole stack is one coherent thing.

We call it an agent. We call it autonomous. But we're granting agency to a ghost — and then wondering why accountability keeps slipping through our hands.