Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Contemporary applications of artificial intelligence are impacting people's abilities to freely act in a morally responsible way. Though tech companies claim that AI will empower our agency and even act as an agent itself, these promises ring hollow in the face of efforts to manipulate us through surveillance capitalism, addictive technologies, widespread deskilling in the workplace, and the growth of algorithmic governance. Even the information we use to make decisions has become dubious due to the rise of misinformation. People find their ability to act shaped and sometimes limited by new technologies. Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence addresses these challenges by providing a vision of human agency grounded in the Christian understanding of humans as created in the image of God with reason and free will who flourish by freely loving God and other people. While affirming the importance of human deliberation and freedom, it also emphasizes the social nature of our agency as it is shaped in positive and negative ways by social forces. The book explores how deliberate human action differs from what is called agentic AI. These analyses provide the grounds for a constructive response to AI's effects on agency.