In the face of rapidly advancing AI technology, individuals will increasingly rely on AI agents to navigate life's growing complexities, raising critical concerns about maintaining both human agency and autonomy. This paper addresses a fundamental dilemma posed by AI decision-support systems: the risk of either becoming overwhelmed by complex decisions, thus losing agency, or having autonomy compromised by externally controlled choice architectures reminiscent of ``nudging'' practices. While the ``nudge'' framework, based on the use of choice-framing to guide individuals toward presumed beneficial outcomes, initially appeared to preserve liberty, at AI-driven scale, it threatens to erode autonomy. To counteract this risk, the paper proposes a philosophic turn in AI design. AI should be constructed to facilitate decentralized truth-seeking and open-ended inquiry, mirroring the Socratic method of philosophical dialogue. By promoting individual and collective adaptive learning, such AI systems would empower users to maintain control over their judgments, augmenting their agency without undermining autonomy. The paper concludes by outlining essential features for autonomy-preserving AI systems, sketching a path toward AI systems that enhance human judgment rather than undermine it.

Cass Sunstein's essay 'On Bob Dylan' describes Dylan's 'dishabituating' style -- a constant refusal to conform to expectation and a penchant for reinventing his musical and lyrical identity. In this paper, I extend Sunstein's observations through a large-scale computational analysis of Dylan's lyrics from 1962 to 2012. Using o3-mini-high (a large language model), I extract concept-to-concept relationships from the lyrics and construct directed knowledge graphs that capture Dylan's thematic structure. I then quantify shifts in sentiment, metaphorical expression, thematic diversity, and network complexity over time. The results indicate that Dylan's lyrics increasingly rely on metaphor, display an evolving sentiment profile, and exhibit heightened dishabituation -- measured here as a growing variance in the network centrality of key concepts. I also find that references to movement, protest, and mythic imagery fluctuate in ways that align with well-known phases of Dylan's career, reflecting the dynamic and unpredictable quality of his art. These findings not only deepen our empirical understanding of Sunstein's thesis but also introduce a novel computational method for analyzing an artist's evolution-offering broader applicability to the study of cultural and creative change.

Legal theory can address two related key problems of alignment: pluralism and specification. Alignment researchers must determine how to specify what is concretely meant by vague principles like helpfulness and fairness and they must ensure that their techniques do not exclude alternative perspectives on life and values. The law faces these same problems. Leading legal theories suggest the law solves these problems through the interaction of rules and cases, where general rules promulgated by a democratic authority are given specific content through their application over time. Concrete applications allow for convergence on practical meaning while preserving space for disagreement on values. These approaches suggest improvements to existing democratic alignment processes that use AI to create cases that give content to rules, allowing for more pluralist alignment.

This chapter examines the challenges of the revised opt out system and the secondary use of health data in England. The analysis of this data could be very valuable for science and medical treatment as well as for the discovery of new drugs. For this reason, the UK government established the care.data program in 2013. The aim of the project was to build a central nationwide database for research and policy planning. However, the processing of personal data was planned without proper public engagement. Research has suggested that IT companies, such as in the Google DeepMind deal case, had access to other kinds of sensitive data and failed to comply with data protection law. Since May 2018, the government has launched the national data opt out system with the hope of regaining public trust. Nevertheless, there are no evidence of significant changes in the ND opt out, compared to the previous opt out system. Neither in the use of secondary data, nor in the choices that patients can make. The only notorious difference seems to be in the way that these options are communicated and framed to the patients. Most importantly, according to the new ND opt out, the type 1 opt out option, which is the only choice that truly stops data from being shared outside direct care, will be removed in 2020. According to the Behavioral Law and Economics literature (Nudge Theory), default rules, such as the revised opt out system in England, are very powerful, because people tend to stick to the default choices made readily available to them. The crucial question analyzed in this chapter is whether it is desirable for the UK government to stop promoting the type 1 opt outs, and whether this could be seen as a kind of hard paternalism.

Language models are transforming the ways that their users engage with the world. Despite impressive capabilities, over-consumption of language model outputs risks propagating unchecked errors in the short-term and damaging human capabilities for critical thinking in the long-term, particularly in knowledge-based tasks. How can we develop scaffolding around language models to curate more appropriate use? We propose selective frictions for language model experiences, inspired by behavioral science interventions, to dampen misuse. Frictions involve small modifications to a user's experience, e.g., the addition of a button impeding model access and reminding a user of their expertise relative to the model. Through a user study with real humans, we observe shifts in user behavior from the imposition of a friction over LLMs in the context of a multi-topic question-answering task as a representative task that people may use LLMs for, e.g., in education and information retrieval. We find that frictions modulate over-reliance by driving down users' click rates while minimally affecting accuracy for those topics. Yet, frictions may have unintended effects. We find marked differences in users' click behaviors even on topics where frictions were not provisioned. Our contributions motivate further study of human-AI behavioral interaction to inform more effective and appropriate LLM use.

Nudging is a behavioral strategy aimed at influencing people's thoughts and actions. Nudging techniques can be found in many situations in our daily lives, and these nudging techniques can targeted at human fast and unconscious thinking, e.g., by using images to generate fear or the more careful and effortful slow thinking, e.g., by releasing information that makes us reflect on our choices. In this paper, we propose and discuss a value-based AI-human collaborative framework where AI systems nudge humans by proposing decision recommendations. Three different nudging modalities, based on when recommendations are presented to the human, are intended to stimulate human fast thinking, slow thinking, or meta-cognition. Values that are relevant to a specific decision scenario are used to decide when and how to use each of these nudging modalities. Examples of values are decision quality, speed, human upskilling and learning, human agency, and privacy. Several values can be present at the same time, and their priorities can vary over time. The framework treats values as parameters to be instantiated in a specific decision environment.

This article aims to provide a theoretical account and corresponding paradigm for analysing how explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) influences people's behaviour and cognition. It uses insights from research on behaviour change. Two notable frameworks for thinking about behaviour change techniques are nudges - aimed at influencing behaviour - and boosts - aimed at fostering capability. It proposes that local and concept-based explanations are more adjacent to nudges, while global and counterfactual explanations are more adjacent to boosts. It outlines a method for measuring XAI influence and argues for the benefits of understanding it for optimal, safe and ethical human-AI collaboration.

Cass R. Sunstein is one of America's foremost legal scholars; he is also a big fan of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Sunstein thinks that science fiction can be a useful tool to inoculate people against status quo bias--our tendency to resist anything new and unfamiliar. "If you love science fiction, you find it fun, and maybe a good little chill goes down your spine, when you think of things that hadn't been dreamt of until 1990 or 2005, and those things excite you, as well as maybe scaring you," Sunstein says in Episode 468 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Sunstein's new book Averting Catastrophe lays out an approach for evaluating unpredictable threats such as asteroids, AI, climate change, and pandemics. One of the book's more science fictional ideas is that people might not need to worry so much about the well-being of future generations, an idea that Sunstein attributes to Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling.

Daniel Kahneman, 87, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. His first book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a worldwide bestseller, set out his revolutionary ideas about human error and bias and how those traits might be recognised and mitigated. A new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, applies those ideas to organisations. This interview took place last week by Zoom with Kahneman at his home in New York. I guess the pandemic is quite a good place to start.

Companies are increasingly using algorithms to manage and control individuals not by force, but rather by nudging them into desirable behavior -- in other words, learning from their personalized data and altering their choices in some subtle way. Since the Cambridge Analytica Scandal in 2017, for example, it is widely known that the flood of targeted advertising and highly personalized content on Facebook may not only nudge users into buying more products, but also to coax and manipulate them into voting for particular political parties. University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein popularized the term "nudge" in 2008, but due to recent advances in AI and machine learning, algorithmic nudging is much more powerful than its non-algorithmic counterpart. With so much data about workers' behavioral patterns at their fingertips, companies can now develop personalized strategies for changing individuals' decisions and behaviors at large scale. These algorithms can be adjusted in real-time, making the approach even more effective.