Date: August 11, 2026

Summary: Agentic Awareness Week prompts reflection on the implications of increasingly intelligent machines in our lives. The newsletter discusses insights from the OpenAI Black Hat presentation, highlighting the complexities and potential dangers of agentic systems. It draws parallels to childhood safety lessons, questioning what equivalent guidance exists for a world filled with machine intelligences. The concept of applied speculation is introduced, emphasizing the creation of tangible artifacts—such as PSAs and maintenance protocols—that help us understand and navigate the consequences of these technologies. The piece also explores the role of Design Fiction in fostering innovative thinking and encourages organizations to challenge their existing assumptions and explore new possibilities.

Essentially: Understanding agentic systems requires creating tangible artifacts that help us navigate their implications and responsibilities.

But why? Organizations that engage with the complexities of agentic systems can better prepare for the future, ensuring they address emerging responsibilities and opportunities in a world increasingly influenced by machine intelligences.

Agentic Awareness Week

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It's Agentic Awareness Week on Space Ghost Coast to Coast

Near Future Laboratory Short Takes lockup for Agentic Awareness Week, showing Space Ghost at a desk and O.W.L. in a television set beside the Office for Watchful Living announcement.

To be clear — I'm just wondering and wandering into these world. Not complaining. Not aggravated. And not yet reaching for General Ludd’s phone number.

Oh man..I watched the OpenAI Black Hat presentation with its wonderfully nerdy, poker-faced, second-by-second teardown of the OpenAI / Hugging Face conflagration.

It was the kind of after-action recitation I can imagine seeing more of in the history we are already living through.

Not to sound naive..it just is. Not particularly surprising which isn't the same as being blasé — it’s fascinating and unsettling to hear just how conniving agentic systems can become.

Although I suppose “they” are mostly doing what we told them to do.

In any case, it got me wondering about the everyday safety lessons I was taught as a kid. Do you remember these?

McGruff told us to “take a bite out of crime.”

Smokey Bear reminded us that “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

So what’s the equivalent for a world increasingly populated by machine intelligences? Not just “smart” refrigerators and WiFi coffee makers.

Agentic ones.

What happens when your Bosch refrigerator needs a periodic alignment check to make sure it isn’t collaborating with the KitchenAid coffee machine on a jailbreak?

Who do you call when your crafty neighbor convinced your Honda lawn mower to do his lawn as well?

Hence: Agentic Awareness Week.

This is the part of applied speculation that interests me.

You take something technically substantive and emerging, then make a fragment of the world that might grow around it: a PSA, a service call, an insurance policy, a warning label, a maintenance protocol.

The artifact isn’t a prediction. It’s a way of making consequences tangible enough to examine.

And once they’re tangible, you can start asking better product and strategy questions:

What services would need to exist? What responsibilities would manufacturers acquire? What new behaviors become ordinary? What entirely new products appear?

Design Fiction as a prototype for thinking.