Agency

Yes.

When I questioned you about the diminishment of human agency, which I thought you underplayed in your talk.

Because I would actually say there is a high theology of human agency in a creaturely way.

That is a, call it a creaturely compliment to divine agency that I thought you underplayed.

So it surprises me because I very much believe that there is something real that happens in Isaac's life through a living human being who is a present comfort to him.

It will maintain critical offline functionality via edge computing so a severed fiber optic cable doesn't plunge you into the dark ages.

It quietly reduces the cognitive load of daily logistics while remaining entirely subservient to human agency.

It's really about eliminating the friction of existence.

but that leaves me with a final provocative thought to leave everyone with.

But

other than that, you see that human agency is at play in every aspect.

I can make right or wrong decisions because

God's moral law is built on our hearts no matter whether we believe or not.

Second technique, I'll just limit it to two now, but I could go on for the rest of our show about how to change from being an optimist to a pessimist.

And part of the reason for wanting to talk about the book Agency is I'd like people to read about this as well.

Here's something I've done with 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States Army.

So, during the Iraq War, the United States Army came to me and said, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, what does positive psychology say about that? And so, Basically, the Army commissioned me to teach the drill sergeants to teach positive psychology to one million men and women in the United States Army.

Well, it turns out there are, last count, 335 studies of these positive techniques on depression, well-being, and anxiety.

What you do is you put the whole literature together, and the literature basically shows that contrary to what you and I might have thought at the beginning, that there are a set of more than a dozen techniques that increase optimism and increase human agency.

What's the relationship between optimism and agency? Agency, your new obsession, this is the new book.

How is it different from optimism? How have you come to conceptualize that?

And so I think a lot about what that tension should look like.

I don't know if anyone knows the answer yet, but we need to figure out ways for this technology to maintain human agency and not take it away from us in some way.

And being able to build whatever I want is giving me agency.

But telling me I should go vote for someone is not giving me agency, but giving me the information could be.

Dr. Seligman is widely credited with founding the modern positive psychology movement and has been called by my graduate advisor, Steven Pinker, perhaps the world's greatest living psychologist.

He's the author of many books, including most recently, Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress, which we'll be speaking about today.

Dr. Seligman, thank you for being with us.

I'm delighted to be here, Omar.

Being a psychologist myself, I plan to discuss agency with Dr. Seligman from the psychological perspective, and Johan will discuss human progress from the historical perspective.

We're going to speak for about 40 minutes total, followed by 20 minutes of audience Q&A.

For our audience, please go to the Cato Agency Event webpage to submit your questions.

Before we start our panel, Dr. Seligman, I'd love to hear an overview of the book from you.

And it forces us to ask the ultimate question for you listening.

What happens to human agency when the logic of these systems becomes so mathematically advanced and operates at such a rapid asynchronous speed that we simply lose the ability to audit its work?

Right.

When the AI discovers a new semiconductor in three days or prescribes a new medicinal dosage based on multidimensional pattern recognition that we literally cannot comprehend, do we just blindly trust the math?

But if your Hark assistant is booking a reservation and the restaurant is using a scheduling AI to manage their tables, well, how long until these agents are just negotiating, arguing, and transacting with each other, completely leaving humans out of the loop?

Where does human agency fit into a world of automated machine to machine action?

That is the defining dilemma we all need to be exploring as these systems integrate deeper into the invisible layers of our daily lives.

The tools are here, and they are taking the mouse out of our hands.