Martin Seligman, PhD, is widely regarded as the father of positive psychology, making groundbreaking discoveries in the field over the course of his rich and impactful career. As artificial intelligence (AI) takes the world by storm, Seligman’s body of work illuminates AI’s potential to significantly contribute to human progress as we’ve never before experienced, or to steal the very thing that drives humans forward, individually and collectively: agency.

Seligman’s latest book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, offers readers an in-depth look into the role agency has played in the advancement of humanity over the course of history, and how we can build our capacity for agency today.

Q: Share a bit about your background and what inspired you to write Agency.

Martin Seligman: In 1964, I watched an animal that had been given shocks it could not control lie down and take the next shock, even after the door to safety was left standing wide open. We called it learned helplessness, and it soon turned out that people do exactly the same thing. That single observation set the course of the next 60 years of my life, first through the study of depression and pessimism, the dark version of the phenomenon, and then through its mirror image, learned optimism, resilience, and the founding of positive psychology.

For decades I was circling something I could not yet name. Late in the arc it finally came clear. Beneath helplessness and optimism alike lay one underlying dimension, and I called it agency: the conviction, and the capacity, that what you do makes a difference, that you are the author of your own life and not a spectator to it. What........

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