Agents Are Not Enough
Last year I was heavily experimenting with Knowledge Graphs because it’s been clear that LLMs by themselves fall short because of the lack of knowledge. This paper by Chirag Shah and Ryen White (you can click the heading above) from Dec 2024 expands on those shortcomings by exploring not just knowledge but also value generation, personalization, and trust.
They open the paper by casting a very wide definition of an “agent” everything from thermostats to LLM tools. While this seems facetious at first, their next point is interesting. Agents by definition “remove agency from a user in order to do things on the user’s behalf and save them time and effort.”. I think this is an interesting way to injext an LLM flavored principal agent problem into the Agentic AI conversation.
Their broad suggestion is to expand the ecosystem of agents by including “Sims”. Sims are simulations of the user which address
- privacy and security
- automated interactions and
- representing the interests of the user by holding intimate knowledge about the user
It’s a short easy read, if you have 10 min.
Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study
Infinite knowledge is available through the internet today. It is available trivially and, some, ahem, blogs make a performance of consuming it. Machiavelli used to
put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.
Some folks have a private office, but an office is not a study. A study or, studiolo
in Italian, a precursor to the modern-day study — came to offer readers access to a different kind of chamber, a personal hideaway in which to converse with the dead. Cocooned within four walls, the studiolo was an aperture through which one could cultivate the self. After all, to know the world, one must begin with knowing the self, as ancient philosophy instructs. In order to know the self, one ought to study other selves too, preferably their ideas as recorded in texts. And since interior spaces shape the inward soul, the studiolo became a sanctuary and a microcosm. The study thus mediates the world, the word, and the self.
In the 1500s Michel de Montaigne writes:
We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness [tout de heur] depends on them. We must reserve a back room [une arriereboutique] all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.
A little later, Virginia Woolf points out what seems to be an eternal inequality by struggling to find “a room of one’s own”.
The enclosure of the study, for those of us lucky to have one, offers us a paradoxical sort of freedom. Conceptually, the studiolo is a pharmakon, a cure or poison for the soul. In its highest aspirations, the studiolo, as developed by humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne, is a sanctuary for self-cultivation. Bookishness was elevated into a saintly virtue
The world today would perhaps be better off if more of us had our own studiolos.
Aneesh Sathe 
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