Super-Human: Reclaiming Our Power to Choose and Shape the Future
About this ebook
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?
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About the author
David Halpern founded the Behavioural Insights Team, the world’s first "Nudge Unit", and was its founding CEO. Originally an academic with tenure at Cambridge University, he spent six years as Chief Analyst to Tony Blair in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, before setting up the UK's Institute for Government and returning to Downing Street to serve three further British Prime Ministers. Now back at Cambridge as Director of the Downing Battcock Institute, he serves on a number of public sector boards. He is an internationally renowned author and speaker and has two children with his American-born wife.
Elisabeth Costa is an internationally recognized public policy expert who has spent almost two decades running experiments to understand what drives our decisions, and advising governments, companies and non-profits around the world. Currently Interim CEO and Chief Innovation Officer of the Behavioural Insights Team, she leads a global team of over 200 people, and is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. She began her career in the Australian Government, completed her postgraduate studies at Harvard Law School, and now splits her time between London and Australia.
