Human Agency, Artificial Intelligence, and the Attention Economy

Human beings face serious danger in navigating the digital world. Our craving for attention and the tendency to distribute it widely is instinctive. So is the tendency to heed fast-moving objects, novel phenomena, and perilous prospects. And we relish convenience and efficiency. While these innate inclinations had clear evolutionary benefits for our species, in a world of digital technologies that covet our engagement and service ever-more of our needs, these predispositions get dangerously exploited. So we find ourselves compulsively circling our digital devices, bewitched by their shimmering screens. We are as moths to a virtual flame, and it may only be a matter of time before our downward spiral reaches a cataclysmic nadir.

In Human Agency, Artificial Intelligence, and the Attention Economy: The Case for Digital Distancing, Leslie Paul Thiele explores the impact of AI-enabled digital platforms on human agency, focusing on how these platforms exploit psychological and emotional predispositions to capture attention, leading to distraction, dependence, and a decline in cognitive and social skills. These troubles then impact our political lives, manipulate human behavior, and undermines our democracy. In hopes of averting this degradation of human agency, he explains how we can cultivate the dispositions, habits, and skills needed to sustain human agency in a world increasingly surveilled and administered by digital technologies.

Leslie Paul Thiele is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at University of Florida, USA. He is also director of Sustainability Studies at University of Florida and of the Center for Adaptive Innovation, Resilience, Ethics and Science. He is the author of many books, including Sustainability (3rd edition, 2024) and The Art and Craft of Political Theory (2019).