In developing and engaging with AI, we need to evaluate its effects on flourishing.

AI relational chatbots hamper our capacity for relationships and should be eliminated.

We are social creatures and need real relationships.

We cannot outsource our reason, relationships, meaning, and joy and expect to flourish.

Artificial intelligence technologies have been rapidly rising. Their potential applications are extraordinary, from information synthesis to robotic surgery, statistical analysis, civil engineering, and more. By leveraging and re-packaging vast quantities of existing knowledge, they seem to open endless possibilities for their use, but also for abuse.

Like any tool, AI can be used for good or for ill. If these technologies are to enhance human flourishing, rather than impede it, then we need to consider whether the design of AI technologies and our engagement with them are oriented towards our own flourishing. Of particular concern is how our use of these technologies is affecting our capacities for reason, for relationship, for transcendence, which go to the heart of our human nature. Are we finding a greater fulfilment through these tools? Or do they threaten to diminish and constrict our lives?

In a recent paper from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard published in the journal Information, we have put forward a set of Flourishing Considerations for AI, discussing how a “flourishing lens” can guide decisions on the design and use of AI technologies related to: (i) the type of output provided; (ii) the specific AI product design; (iii) our engagement with those products; the effects this is having on (iv) human knowledge; and on (v) the self-realization of the human person.

We’ve made use of our general framework for conceptualizing and assessing human flourishing, oriented around six domains: happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial resources. We argue in our new paper that whenever an AI product is developed, and whenever we are deciding whether to use it, we should consider how it will affect our happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security, among........

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