
Why Agentic AI Was Always Going to Fail: The Named-Human Test and the Evidence Behind It
The Other AI: Audio Briefings on Augmented Intelligence and AI GovernanceShow Notes
The agentic AI era promised to replace humans with autonomous systems. The evidence says that project failed on two fronts: the technology has not delivered reliable replacement, and the public is rejecting the premise even where it partially works. This episode is an audio overview of the white paper "Why Agentic AI Was Always Going to Fail," published at basilpuglisi.com. The paper introduces the Named-Human Test, a single sorting question that classifies any AI system: is there a named human with binding authority over the output who answers through moral, professional, civil, or criminal accountability? The episode covers: The production evidence: agents completing roughly 24 percent of workplace tasks, multi-step accuracy collapsing by nearly half, and over 40 percent of agentic projects forecast for cancellation by 2027. The public rejection: supermajority polling in 2026 opposing AI making consequential decisions without human accountability. The regulatory hardening: Colorado, Connecticut, the EU, and the UK writing meaningful human review into enforceable law. The Economic Override Pattern: why the governance gap is driven by incentive structure, not immaturity, independently corroborated by a 272-expert MIT Delphi study. The frontier governance gap: Anthropic's own data showing 80 percent of production code authored by Claude reviewing Claude, confirming the governance-gap analysis published six months earlier in "The Missing Governor." The resolution: why Stop AI fails, why Regulate AI alone fails, and why the evidence converges on Augmented Intelligence under AI Governance with a named human at the checkpoint. Full paper with complete sourcing and methodology: basilpuglisi.com/why-agentic-ai-was-always-going-to-fail/ Podcast: The Other AI: Audio Briefings on Augmented Intelligence and AI Governance Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033dvhzMIcWLdY7IUgsu7F Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1896506152 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/923d1a79-533f-4623-bae3-e2ba83453dfb YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLchpU2bIYoEEBh2hdY-BVP9ckyTPiHOAQ These are AI generated under NotebookLM as audio overviews not polished products. #AIassisted using HAIA Ecosystem
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