The Question Technology Forces Us to Answer
What is a good life?
For millennia, philosophers have wrestled with this question, offering answers grounded in virtue, pleasure, duty, or authentic self-expression. But these were always thought experiments—abstract frameworks debated in seminar rooms while actual lives unfolded according to constraints far more immediate than philosophical ideals. People lived as circumstances permitted, not as philosophy prescribed.
Artificial intelligence changes this. For the first time in history, we face technology powerful enough to reshape the material conditions of existence at civilizational scale—not gradually, across generations, but within decades. And the reshaping is not merely economic or political. It is existential. AI does not simply alter what jobs exist or how wealth is distributed. It transforms what it means to be human in the most fundamental sense: what activities give life purpose, what relationships sustain us, what forms of excellence we cultivate, what dignity we can claim.
When machines perform cognitive labor once considered distinctively human—analysis, creativity, problem-solving, even teaching and care—we are forced to answer the question philosophy left abstract: What remains for humans to do that makes life worth living? Not what can we do—AI will soon surpass humans at most measurable tasks. But what should we do? What forms of activity cultivate human excellence? What constitutes a life well-lived when the economic rationale for much human effort evaporates?
This is not dystopian speculation. It is the trajectory we are on. And the answer we give—through the design of AI systems, through the policies that govern them, through the educational systems that prepare people for AI-integrated futures—will determine whether technology serves human flourishing or undermines the very conditions that make flourishing possible.
This is why human flourishing forms the fourth and final pillar of our work at the Society & AI Independent Research Group.
What Flourishing Actually Means
To speak meaningfully about human flourishing, we must move beyond platitudes. Flourishing is not mere happiness—that transient emotional state that can be chemically induced or algorithmically manipulated. Nor is it prosperity—material abundance tells us nothing about whether lives have meaning or dignity. Nor is it even health and longevity, necessary though they are. Flourishing is something richer and more elusive: a life characterized by agency, meaning, creativity, authentic connection, and the recognition of one’s fundamental dignity as a person, not merely a means to others’ ends.
Let us be precise about what each dimension entails, because the threats AI poses—and the opportunities it creates—differ for each.
Agency: The Capacity to Shape One’s Life
Agency is not simply the ability to choose from pre-determined options, as a consumer selects products from a menu. It is the more profound capacity to determine what options exist, to set one’s own goals, to exercise meaningful control over the trajectory of one’s life. Agency requires autonomy (the freedom from manipulation and coercion), competence (the skills to navigate complexity), and the social recognition that one’s choices matter.
AI threatens agency in multiple ways. Algorithmic curation narrows the information people encounter, shaping beliefs without awareness. Predictive systems determine opportunities—what jobs are offered, what loans are approved, what educational pathways open—often opaquely and without appeal. Adaptive interfaces learn to manipulate users toward outcomes that serve platform goals, not user wellbeing. Over time, these systems can create a condition of learned dependence: people lose the capacity to navigate without algorithmic guidance, surrendering agency for convenience.
Yet AI can also strengthen agency. When systems provide transparent reasoning, enable meaningful control, and augment rather than automate judgment, they expand the space of what individuals can accomplish. The question is not whether AI affects agency—it does, profoundly—but whether we design systems that cultivate independence or induce passivity.
Meaning: The Sense That One’s Life and Activities Matter
Meaning arises from multiple sources—purpose (pursuing goals that transcend immediate gratification), connection (relationships that affirm our value to others), creativity (the ability to bring something new into existence), and growth (the sense of becoming more capable over time). Lives rich in meaning are not necessarily pleasant, but they are rarely regretted.
AI poses a profound threat to meaning through the automation of purpose itself. When machines perform the cognitive work that once gave lives structure and significance—when teachers are replaced by tutoring algorithms, when artisans are displaced by generative systems, when caregivers are substituted with synthetic companions—what remains for humans to do that feels genuinely valuable?
This is not merely an economic question about employment. It is an existential one. Work has historically provided not just income but identity, daily rhythm, social connection, and the satisfaction of contribution. If AI eliminates not just jobs but the sense that human effort matters, we risk creating societies of material abundance and spiritual desolation. The antidote is not to resist automation but to redefine value so that forms of human excellence that cannot and should not be automated—care, creativity, judgment, ethical reasoning, community-building—receive the recognition and support they deserve.
Creativity: The Generative Capacity to Imagine and Create
Creativity is often romanticized as rare genius, but it is actually ubiquitous—evident in how teachers adapt lessons to learner needs, how parents respond to their children’s unique personalities, how communities solve local problems, how individuals make sense of their experiences through narrative. Creativity is fundamentally about bringing novelty into the world in response to context that algorithms cannot fully anticipate.
Generative AI produces outputs that mimic creativity—images, text, music, code. But these are recombinations of existing patterns, not responses to lived experience or embodied understanding. The risk is not that AI becomes “truly creative” in some human-like sense, but that it cheapens the very concept of creativity by flooding the world with plausible-but-derivative content, making genuine originality harder to recognize and reward.
The response is not to ban generative systems but to cultivate discernment—to help people understand what makes something genuinely novel versus stylistically novel, what constitutes synthesis versus superficial mashup, what reflects understanding versus statistical correlation. Education in an age of generative AI must develop the capacities to create with these tools while maintaining the standards that distinguish craft from convenience.
Connection: Authentic Bonds With Other Humans and the World
Human beings are irreducibly social. We develop identity through relationship, find meaning in shared endeavor, and experience wellbeing in proportion to the quality of our connections with others. But not all connection is equal. Authentic connection requires mutual vulnerability, the risk of genuine encounter, the possibility of being changed by the other. It cannot be scripted, optimized, or outsourced.
AI threatens connection when it mediates human interaction in ways that reduce friction but also reduce depth. Algorithmic matching promises perfect compatibility but eliminates the serendipity that makes relationships surprising. Synthetic companions offer unconditional validation but cannot reciprocate or challenge. Platforms optimize for engagement but privilege outrage over understanding, performance over authenticity.
Yet technology can also strengthen connection—enabling communication across distance, facilitating coordination of collective action, making visible communities that would otherwise remain isolated. The distinction lies in whether systems are designed to augment human relationality or to substitute for it, to create conditions for genuine encounter or to simulate the appearance of connection while avoiding its demands.
Dignity: The Recognition That Persons Are Ends, Not Means
Dignity is the philosophical bedrock upon which all other dimensions rest. It is the principle that every person possesses intrinsic worth, independent of their productivity, their compliance, their utility to others. Dignity forbids treating people as mere instruments—as data sources to be mined, as attention to be monetized, as labor to be optimized, as behavior to be modified.
AI poses unique threats to dignity through surveillance, manipulation, and reduction. When every interaction is tracked, every preference logged, every deviation from predicted behavior flagged—people cease to be recognized as autonomous subjects and become knowable, predictable, controllable objects. When systems nudge users toward predetermined outcomes, dignity erodes because choice becomes theatre rather than authentic self-determination. When individuals are reduced to demographic categories, credit scores, risk profiles—the irreducible complexity of personhood disappears beneath the tyranny of metrics.
The protection of dignity requires more than privacy policies and consent forms. It demands architectural constraints: systems that minimize data collection, processing that happens locally rather than centrally, interfaces that resist manipulative design, and governance that gives people meaningful power over the systems that shape their lives.
Why Education Bears Special Responsibility
Educational systems do more than transmit knowledge. They shape who people become—what they believe is possible, what they value, what forms of excellence they pursue, what relationships they form with authority and with each other. In the age of AI, education faces a profound responsibility: to prepare people not merely to use intelligent systems but to remain fully human in a world saturated by them.
This requires several shifts in educational purpose and practice:
From Skill Acquisition to Capability Cultivation
Traditional education optimizes for measurable competencies—reading levels, mathematical procedures, factual recall. These remain important, but they are no longer sufficient. When AI can perform most procedural tasks with superhuman reliability, education must cultivate the distinctively human capacities that machines cannot replicate: ethical judgment in complex situations, creative synthesis across disparate domains, collaborative problem-solving with diverse others, metacognitive awareness of one’s own thinking, and the resilience to navigate uncertainty.
This is not anti-intellectual romanticism. It is recognition that human excellence in an AI age will be defined not by what we know but by how we think, how we relate, and what we create that reflects understanding no algorithm possesses.
From Individual Competition to Collective Capability
Educational systems structured around individual competition, standardized testing, and hierarchical ranking prepare students for a world where intelligence is scarce and must be rationed. But AI makes intelligence abundant. The scarce resource becomes not cognitive power but the capacity for coordination, trust-building, and collective sense-making—the social capabilities that enable groups to accomplish what no individual, however capable, can achieve alone.
This demands pedagogies centered on collaboration, dialogue, perspective-taking, and the negotiation of difference. It requires assessment that values not just individual achievement but contribution to collective understanding. It means creating learning environments where students practice the hard work of building shared knowledge across different backgrounds, worldviews, and forms of expertise.
From Passive Consumption to Active Creation
When information is abundant and instantly accessible, the educational bottleneck is no longer acquisition but synthesis, evaluation, and creation. Students must move from consuming knowledge to producing it—formulating questions, designing investigations, building arguments, creating artifacts that embody understanding. AI should accelerate this shift by handling routine information retrieval, freeing learners to focus on higher-order thinking.
But this only works if educational systems resist the temptation to automate away the productive struggle. Learning happens through grappling with difficulty, through making mistakes and correcting them, through the incremental building of understanding that cannot be shortcut. AI that eliminates challenge eliminates learning.
From Algorithmic Efficiency to Human Relationship
The most profound learning happens in relationship—when students feel seen, valued, and challenged by teachers who know them as whole persons, not data points. When families trust that schools have their children’s interests at heart. When communities believe education serves collective flourishing, not just individual advancement.
AI deployed to maximize efficiency—larger class sizes “supported” by algorithms, standardized content “personalized” through adaptive software—often erodes these relationships. The alternative is AI designed to strengthen teacher capacity for relationship-building—reducing administrative burden, surfacing insights that enable more responsive teaching, and creating space for the irreplaceable human work of mentorship.
Our Research Commitments
We approach human flourishing through conceptual, empirical, and design work that respects the complexity of what makes life worth living:
Articulating Flourishing Across Cultural Contexts
We resist the temptation to impose a single vision of the good life. Instead, we work with diverse communities to understand how flourishing is conceived across cultural traditions—what constitutes agency in collectivist versus individualist societies, what sources of meaning resonate in different religious and philosophical frameworks, how dignity is understood where Western notions of individual rights are not paramount.
This pluralism is not relativism. It is recognition that universal human needs for autonomy, competence, relatedness, meaning, and dignity manifest differently across contexts. Our frameworks must be flexible enough to honor this diversity while maintaining core commitments to human dignity and agency.
Measuring What Matters Without Reducing It
We develop indicators of flourishing that capture nuance without collapsing richness into simplistic metrics: self-reported wellbeing combined with qualitative accounts of meaning, behavioral indicators of engagement paired with ethnographic observation of classroom climate, physiological markers of stress alongside students’ narrative sense-making.
We resist the tyranny of the measurable—the assumption that what cannot be quantified does not matter. Some dimensions of flourishing are best understood through thick description, through case studies, through the accumulated wisdom of practitioners who see whole persons over time.
Designing Technology That Serves Rather Than Subverts Flourishing
We translate philosophical commitments into design principles:
Transparency: Systems should make their reasoning visible so users can evaluate and challenge it, preserving epistemic agency.
Meaningful Control: People should have genuine power to configure systems to their values, not merely choice among predetermined options.
Authentic Friction: Some forms of difficulty should be preserved—the cognitive work of understanding, the social work of relationship-building, the creative work of synthesis—because these are not obstacles to flourishing but constitutive of it.
Privacy as Dignity Protection: Minimal data collection, local processing, clear purpose limitation, and the power to delete—these are not technical requirements but ethical imperatives.
Community Governance: People most affected by systems should have meaningful voice in how they operate, ensuring technology serves collective flourishing, not narrow efficiency.
Advocating for Policy That Institutionalizes Flourishing
Technology alone does not determine outcomes. Policy shapes whether systems serve wellbeing or undermine it. We advocate for:
Right to Human Decision-Making: High-stakes educational judgments—placement, discipline, graduation—should require human review, not algorithmic automation.
Limits on Surveillance: Students should have spaces to experiment, fail, and grow without every action being logged and analyzed.
Social Support Infrastructure: As automation displaces labor, societies must decouple survival from market-valued work, enabling people to pursue forms of excellence that are intrinsically valuable.
Educational Mandates: Schools should be required to cultivate the full range of human capabilities, not just those optimized for by algorithmic metrics.
Why This Matters: The Civilizational Stakes
The question of human flourishing in AI societies is not merely philosophical. It will determine:
Whether Democracy Survives: Self-governance requires citizens capable of independent thought, critical evaluation of authority, and deliberation with those who disagree. If AI creates passive, algorithmically-guided populations incapable of independent judgment, democracy cannot function.
Whether Life Retains Meaning: If technological advancement eliminates the activities that give lives purpose without replacing them with new forms of valued contribution, we risk creating societies of material abundance and existential despair.
Whether We Remain Recognizably Human: The qualities we most value—creativity, moral reasoning, relational depth, the capacity for self-transcendence—are not innate endowments but cultivated capabilities. If education ceases to cultivate them, they will atrophy.
Whether Future Generations Forgive Us: We are making choices now—about what systems to build, what values to encode, what capabilities to prioritize—that will shape the conditions of human existence for centuries. The question is not what technology makes possible but what kind of ancestors we choose to be.
The Path Forward
Human flourishing cannot be engineered. It emerges from conditions—social, material, educational—that we can cultivate or erode. AI will reshape those conditions at scale. The question is whether we will design systems and policies that:
- Preserve human agency through transparency and meaningful control
- Create new sources of meaning as old forms of work become automated
- Cultivate creativity as a widely distributed capacity, not rare genius
- Strengthen authentic connection rather than simulating it
- Protect dignity through privacy, consent, and democratic governance
The Society & AI Lab exists to ensure these questions are asked and answered in ways that center human wellbeing, not technological capability or economic efficiency. Because the measure of civilization is not what we build but how we live—and whether the lives we enable are ones worth living.
We are at a threshold. The choices we make now about AI in education will determine not just what students learn but who they become. Let us choose with the full weight of that responsibility in mind.
AI will reshape society. But the question is not what technology makes possible—it is what kind of future we choose to build. Our research asks: Can we harness AI’s power while preserving the agency, meaning, creativity, connection, and dignity that make human life worth living? The answer depends on choices we make today about design, governance, and the values that guide technological development.