i survived case 2026 and all i got was this foucauldian curiosity

I have been asked for my thoughts on CASE 2026. I wanted to write a LinkedIn-friendly TOP 5 TAKEAWAYS post, or a straightforward summary of the papers I liked and the best dish I ate. But the truth is I got distracted by some intrusive thoughts while I was enjoying the talks and the buffet.

So: weird CASE 2026 review incoming.

I’ve spent the last few days drinking from the firehose of control, optimisation, digital (and physical) twins, uncertainty, agents and the evolving architectures of automation. Everything is awesome. I look increasingly like the murder-board meme guy. I’m gonna pop.

Top line: there’s pretty much nothing better than parachuting yourself into a dynamic mass of geniuses who know everything about your favourite topics on the planet.

And if you’ll join me over at the murder board for a moment, I’ll run you through the thought I came home with:

Somewhere in every intelligent system there will be an allocation rule that determines whether, and how, the agency of its participants translates into the authority to know, decide and act.

Now, before I go on, let me hit a “LinkedIn voice” KPI and take you on a flavoursome detour that at first seems unrelated to this moment.

In 2019, I was sitting in a room at Techstars Music in LA. I was talking to my ninth investor of the day and he was telling me where he and his friends had been injecting their money. It dawned on me that all of the investors I had spoken to were buying the exact same future.

They kept talking about it as if it were a risky bet they were making, but it felt more like an inevitability than speculation. We build the technologies they fund, and they were funding AI. Where is the uncertainty?

At that point I understood that AI was not an abstract vision or a hype myth anymore. It was not an investment thesis. It was bought and paid for.

…aaand we’re back.

CASE 2026 has left me with a similar feeling about the systems of tomorrow, and a real fervour for filling in my blind spots about what we’re actually baking into them.

That conference is a playground for folks who have been designing genuinely productive automation solutions since before ChatGPT was a kasquillion-dollar twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. In that room, the agentic future stops being the speculative cultural anxiety of “what will it do to us?” and becomes a bounded design problem.

CASE 2026 presented a pretty compelling vision of what’s coming—by virtue of it already being half-built: collaborative intelligent systems made up of humans, machines and all kinds of flexible agency. A sort of unstoppable chimera that endlessly adapts and augments and improves itself and its conspirators.

I don’t think this is abstract or speculative anymore, although modularity might remain unsolved for all of time. Engineers and scientists are very excited about a future in which natural agency is truly amplified by artificial agency.

We are building for a future that exists inside a particular quadrant of a crude artificial-agency × natural-agency matrix. We live in the optimistic (+, +) square, where more capable machines make humans more capable.

I include myself here. I am excited by this future too. I believe in this quadrant too. It’s the collaboration quadrant.

But while I was listening to all these brilliant people and their case studies and pipelines and findings, I couldn’t help but wonder—compulsively—about the other quadrants on the board:

• human subjugation (− natural agency, + artificial agency)
• machine subjugation (+ natural agency, − artificial agency)
• degeneration (−, −)

I was thinking about the plus-plus frame and the speculative cultural anxiety and how they interact. I’d be enthralled by something, taking a note like “resolution of reality?”, and then apropos of nothing my brain would ask:

But, wait, back to this other thing: does human autonomy necessarily diminish as artificial agency increases?

At some point in this process of perhaps-obvious intrusive thinking, I realised that the plus-plus engineers and the culturally anxious seemed to be circling the same idea: artificial agency can amplify some characteristic of its deployer in a way most tools do not.

Where people diverge is over the nature of that amplification. Symmetric amplification can preserve relative positions. Asymmetric amplification can rearrange them.

Even stickier is the fact that intelligent systems can go beyond redistributing existing authority. They can make new dimensions of the human machine accessible, and thus governable.

Machine observation can become inference. Inference can become classification. Classification can become action. By making previously latent human states machine-legible, the domain over which authority can be exercised expands.

Whether that is good or bad news depends entirely on who is deploying what, and in which direction.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to ask a lot of questions.

Which bits of this are zero-sum? Why? Who is observing whom? Who gets to decide? Who gets to act? Should authority depend on insight? Confidence? Competence? Risk? Is there some authority that should remain with the human operator, regardless of comparative performance? When should a machine defer to a human? When should it insist? At what point does assistance become control?

Who designs the allocation rule? Who can contest it?

To me, the question feels less like:

Will AI consume all human agency?

And more like:

What kind of relationship are we engineering between natural and artificial intelligence—and what mediates the translation of agency into authority in this brave new world?

If engineers are going to build genuinely collaborative intelligent systems, we need ways to reason about the politics of autonomy and authority with the same seriousness that we reason about uncertainty, stability and control.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I am sure the cultural theorists sorted this out in the 18th century or the ’70s or whatever. I’ll check in with Foucault once I’ve finished trying to guess the system equations.

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This is a conference reflection, not a paper-by-paper summary. CASE 2026 was the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, held in Shenyang from 17–21 August 2026; the official technical program is the useful version if you came here for the actual proceedings.