Episode #1038 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Marcus Fontoura gets into one of the most important questions of the AI era: how much agency do we really have when the technologies shaping our lives have become so powerful, so invisible and so hard for most people to understand? We use search engines, social platforms, recommendation systems, cloud infrastructure and AI tools every day, but most of us experience them from the outside.

We see the interface. We feel the consequences. We rarely understand the machinery.

Marcus is a rare guide for this conversation. He is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, with decades of experience building the systems that power the modern internet. His career includes leadership roles at Microsoft Azure, Google and IBM, and his new book, Human Agency In A Digital World, is a call for technological literacy at a moment when understanding how these systems work may be as important as understanding economics, media or government.

What makes Marcus’s perspective land is that he does not treat technology as magic, doom or destiny.

He explains it as something humans build, shape, regulate, misuse, improve and misunderstand. That matters because so much of the current conversation about AI swings between fear and fantasy. Either the machines are coming for everything or technology will somehow solve everything by itself. Marcus pushes for something more grounded: curiosity, responsibility and a better public understanding of the systems we now depend on. In this conversation, we talk about optimism. The kind that believes more people with access to information, computing power and AI tools can build better solutions in healthcare, education, climate, science and entrepreneurship.

Mostly, this is a conversation about refusing to become passive in a digital world.

Technology may be getting more complex, but agency begins with understanding. The more we know about how these systems work, the better chance we have of shaping what they become.

Please listen to my conversation with Marcus Fontoura here: Human Agency With Marcus Fontoura.

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