The Agency Transfer: What Happens When Machines Make Decisions Humans Used to Make

Agency transfer — the migration of consequential decisions from human judgment to automated systems — is not a binary event. It is a gradient with a threshold beyond which reversal becomes operationally non-viable. Drawing on banking automation in 1990s Uzbekistan, the live rollout of electronic prescriptions (DMED), and the classical automation literature (Bainbridge, Parasuraman), this essay names the mechanism through which the correction window closes: not through crisis, but through the quiet atrophy of human institutional capacity. It proposes an operational instrument — the agency transfer audit — and identifies three dimensions of reversibility that current governance frameworks do not measure. Essay 8 of the series Beyond Control: Theory of Limits of AI Governance by Oybek Khodjaev (INVEXI LLC, Tashkent, Uzbekistan). Full text: https://okhodjaev.com/essays/the-agency-transfer/