Summary: Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole. Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, researchers rapidly discovering cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer, and AI advisors empowering people to navigate complex systems and achieve their goals. Hoffman and co-author, tech and culture writer Greg Beato envision a world where these possibilities, and many more, become a reality. Superagency challenges conventional fears, inviting us to view the future through a lens of opportunity, rather than fear. It’s a call to action – to embrace AI with excitement and actively shape a world where human ingenuity and the power of AI combine to create something extraordinary.
The future is notoriously hard to foresee accurately—for pessimists and optimists alike. We didn’t get the permanent mass unemployment that labor experts in the early 1960s anticipated; nor did we get The Jetsons and its flying cars—at least not yet. (View Highlight)
we know from thousands of years of experience that if a technology can be created, humans will create it. (View Highlight)
We continuously create new tools to amplify our capabilities and shape the world to our liking. In turn, these tools end up shaping us as well. What this suggests is that human- ism and technology, so often presented as oppositional forces, are in fact integrative ones. Every new technology we’ve invented—from lan- guage, to books, to the mobile phone—has defined, redefined, deep- ened, and expanded what it means to be human. (View Highlight)
You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with paint- ing. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. (View Highlight)
For Socrates, apparently, fixing his thoughts into written text repre- sented a loss of agency. (View Highlight)
As printing technologies improved, books evolved into a transfor- mative global resource. Rolling about everywhere, indiscriminately reaching everyone, they functioned as early mobility machines, de- coupling human cognition from human brains, democratizing knowl- edge, accelerating human progress, and providing a way for individuals and whole societies to benefit from the most profound and impactful human insights and innovations across time and space. (View Highlight)