People Neglect Human Agency Both Ways: Exaggerated Doom and Complacent Optimism

jankulveit · x · 2026-09-11

Stefan Schubert observes that people neglect human agency prospectively and retrospectively, with opposite implications: they assume we will sleepwalk into future catastrophes (driving exaggerated pessimism), while believing past risks were never real (the "preparedness paradox", driving complacent optimism). Jan Kulveit highlights this as a key lens for AI risk debates.

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