#01: The erotic power of agency

And how it might free us from gendered notions of intelligence

When I was five, I named my pet cat after the most intelligent girl in my class. Let’s call this girl Polly.

Polly was small and blonde and gifted. She was born extremely premature to quintessentially British parents, and she was on the shy side. As a 5-year-old, I did not have a nuanced understanding of intelligence. But I knew Polly had it in spades and I admired it. I liked sitting next to Polly at school for this reason, watching her blue-inked Berol sweep across the page in response to every exercise on any subject—basking in her genius.

The only subject Polly did not excel at was sports. Swimming, in particular, was a struggle because she was afraid of the water and relied on armbands for much longer than the rest of us. I liked swimming and was quite good at it, but this did not factor into my young, Polly-aspiring self. Time passed, but she always had more of what I wanted. In our final year of junior school—the last months we would ever spend together before I moved to a different secondary—Polly became Head Girl, and I her Deputy.

My idolisation of Polly is the earliest memory I have of my internal drive for and preoccupation with intellect.

This post is an attempt to explore how preconceived notions of intelligence shape our sense of self-worth and potential, the gendered nature of those notions, and whether the rise of artificial intelligence can offer a new lens.

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Late last year, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI company Anthropic, published ‘Machines of Loving Grace’—an extensive essay on the state of AI advancements. As early as 2026, he said, virtually anyone could have access to an AI model smarter than a Nobel Prize winner “in terms of pure intelligence” across most fields.

What exactly is pure intelligence? Amodei acknowledges its complex nature but uses the term himself to refer to “a general problem-solving capability that can be applied across diverse domains. This includes abilities like reasoning, learning, planning, and creativity.”

The first time I read ‘Machines of Loving Grace’, I took the following note:

Will we finally stop being afraid to look stupid because all humans, relative to AI, will be stupid? Could this actually be freeing?

It’s taken me decades to reach a point where, in certain contexts, I am unafraid to look stupid. In these cases, it’s because I actually feel safe enough to prioritise my desire for genuine understanding over my desire to be seen as smart.

Being unafraid to look stupid doesn’t come easy to women. A 2023 study of Swedish adolescents reported girls having a higher level of anxiety than boys over the fear of failing, echoing a famous study series from the 80s that showed bright 5th-grade girls were more likely to give up on a new challenging task than their bright male counterparts because the girls believed their abilities were innate and unchangeable, while the boys believed they could develop ability through effort and practice.

The most likely root cause of this difference is in how adults give feedback to young boys and girls. Girls are often praised for their “goodness” because they can better follow instructions as a function of developing self-control earlier. Boys, on the other hand, are less obedient and consequently receive more effort-oriented feedback as a form of motivation (e.g., “If you could just try a bit harder, you would get this right.”)

This conditioning plays out in current AI usage. Women are already 25% less likely on average to adopt AI in the workplace than men because they are afraid of being judged as not having enough expertise if they do. When your mental model of intelligence is that it is innate, using AI is tantamount to cheating. This could have major ramifications if it plays out at scale. Given AI’s predicted productivity gains, women who aren’t AI-fluent could fall behind their male colleagues and struggle to advance their careers, resulting in a widening gender pay gap.

I had always prized innate intelligence over effort. Polly was a genius; I was just a hard worker with aptitude. Thus, my deputy position was justified. This narrative persisted as I encountered other Pollys in secondary and higher education, quietly gnawing away at my self-confidence over time. But something has started to shift in the last couple of years, and I think it comes down to the compounding effects of two parallel experiences: working at a startup and writing this newsletter.

The writing experience always comes with the confrontation of a blank page. You overcome the fear not by being gifted but by showing up consistently and proving to yourself repeatedly that you can turn nothing into something.

The same is true of startups. It’s another kind of blank page: you’re trying to create a company, product, and brand from scratch, all at the same time, under a high degree of change and uncertainty. All the playbooks are yours to build.

In my experience, 90% of the outcomes achieved in a startup come from the combination of:

1. Caring an unreasonable amount

2. Asking yourself, ‘How hard can it be?’

3. Making shit happen

I never had a problem with 1 or 3, but embracing 2 took a while. Funny that.

Based on the school studies mentioned earlier, we could say that writing and startup life have finally taught me to value effort over innate intellect. But that wouldn’t quite do justice to the lesson: I already knew how to work hard and exert myself from a young age. The difference in this case is in the nature of the effort. Rather than trying hard for the sake of it—to be perceived as “good” or “clever"—I’ve begun to internalise the value of acting in line with a specific and desired intention. In other words, I’ve learned the value of my own agency.

One of my favourite pieces on agency is from the lawyer-turned-poker-player-turned-startup founder, Cate Hall. She argues that agency is not an inherent trait but a skill that can be learned and acts as an “all-purpose life intensifier.” I love this description and it rings true with my personal experience. The more you allow yourself to try, and the more you allow yourself to care about the things you are trying, the more vivid and energizing life gets.

Writing this newsletter feels exactly like that. On one level, there’s a deep intrinsic satisfaction in attempting to translate amorphous, abstract ideas into words. On another level, there’s an extrinsic motivation in writing so that others may dare to start writing themselves. When I published my last piece in February, numerous women replied saying they felt inspired to do exactly that. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

This is the important distinction between effort and agency. Effort is just exertion. Agency = exertion + determination + care.

Agency is a hot topic in AI right now. Every artificial intelligence company, mine included, is currently in a race to build agentic AI—AI that goes beyond finding information and answering questions to taking actions on tasks (semi) autonomously.

Does agentic AI diminish the need for human agency? After all, if the technology can accomplish an ever-growing range of tasks at lightning speed, we could just sit back and let it shoulder as much of the load as possible.

Take writing. Everything from writing a work email to drafting a school essay is now essentially a choice because AI can generate it for you. As Paul Graham says, this is not an unprecedented situation. Once upon a time, the nature of human work (physical labour) made most people strong. Then we invented machines that could do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, and suddenly, being physically strong became a choice. (Enter: gyms.)

The same is now true for writing. Today, if you want to be a good writer, it’s because you care about the benefits it can bring you. Graham argues that not caring about being good at writing is a serious problem because writing is thinking:

“It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.”

I agree with Graham—there is no better way to think than to write.

But writing isn’t only thinking. It is also feeling.

Writing is feeling and thinking because it’s a process by which humans can attempt to translate our raw emotions and experiences into words. Joan Didion summed it up well:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

By Graham’s logic, then, a world in which few people can write well is also a world in which few people can feel well.

Why is this a problem? Because it hampers agency. If humans lack the ability to translate into words our raw emotions and experiences, we lose the opportunity to understand what they mean for ourselves and potentially those around us. If we cannot name our own realities, how can we expect to change them?

The writer and activist Audré Lorde knew this better than anyone:

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

From Plato's elevation of reason over emotion to Descartes' “I think, therefore I am,” Western philosophy has a longstanding tradition of valuing cognitive processes over emotional awareness—and this dichotomy has always been gendered. Aristotle linked reason (logos) with men and emotion (pathos) with women and declared there was no room for pathos in the polis.

For Lorde, the thinking over feeling hierarchy is a tool of suppression because it prevents people from accessing the emotions they need to bring about change. This is what Lorde means when she refers to poetry: it’s the process by which we go from experience to language to idea and finally to action. When we commit to it fully, we free ourselves.

Lorde believes that to experience this depth of feeling is to experience the actual (non-sexualised) meaning of the erotic:

“The erotic is a measure between the feelings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognising its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. [...]

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within their lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

Through the erotic, Lorde's perspective invites us to expand our definition of intelligence beyond cognitive processes to include embodied knowledge—the wisdom that comes from lived experience and emotional awareness. This broader conception doesn't reject analytical thinking but rather situates it within a more holistic understanding of human capability.

It might also just be the most beautiful definition of human agency I have ever read.

When I think about my best writing and working days, they feel just as Lorde describes them: challenging, fulfilling, and invigorating—dare I say, loving? The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love.

Perhaps this is the ultimate liberation AI offers us. Not freedom from thinking or fear of failure, but freedom to reclaim the power of feeling as a source and marker of our own intelligence. For in a world increasingly mediated by AI, our human ability to access, trust, and act upon our deepest emotions may be what saves us from becoming passive observers of algorithmic output. Active participation in our own existence depends on staying intentional about the skills we hone vs. the ones we relinquish. It would be an ironic and beautiful thing if agentic AI became a catalyst for human agency, so long as that agency is constructively channelled.

But let’s not give AI all the credit. It wasn’t involved in my decision to start writing four and a half years ago. And while I work for an AI startup, the technology itself did not create or sustain a ‘how hard can it be?’, high-care culture. Humans did. Without AI’s rapid advances, however, I might not have paused to reflect on the impact of these two experiences and realise how my notion of intelligence was already evolving.

And thank God it is evolving. When I look back on my younger self now, I see a different story emerging. Instead of an inferior deputy to a prodigy Polly, I see a determined little girl who always raised her hand, who cared about everything she was trying to learn, and who never, ever stopped demanding more from herself.

She was a girl who thought and felt deeply. In this respect, she was already free.