Super-Human: Reclaiming Our Power to Choose and Shape the Future

Summary

Two of the world's leading researchers on behavior and decision-making join forces to equip readers with the knowledge, tools, and techniques to live their fullest human life in an age of powerful technology.

We have more choice than ever before yet feel less in control. This book is about fighting back—individually and collectively—and becoming the best of ourselves.

Drawing on over 1,000 experiments run across more than seventy countries, Halpern and Costa pair rigorous scientific findings with compelling stories, to pull back the curtain on the psychological, systemic, and technological forces that shape our decisions and behavior. More than that, they outline practical ways to make better decisions and put humans back in the driver’s seat with agency to shape—rather than be manipulated by—the forces around us.

Super-Human unfolds across three parts:

• Human. What can each of us do to sharpen our own decision-making and strengthen our agency?
• Supra-Human. How can we design social networks, markets, and institutions to expand human agency?
• Super-Human. How can we shape artificial intelligence so that it amplifies human capability and agency rather than replacing or eroding it?

Our minds have been shaped by the technologies and institutions of our ancestors, in ways they could not have anticipated. We have an advantage they lacked: we can see the choices coming. Super-Human ultimately asks us to make the biggest choice of all: in an age when machines can “think,” act, and even “feel” on our behalf—what kind of humans do we want to be? Can we become both more super, and more human?