philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

MIT Media Lab To Put Human Flourishing At The Heart Of AI R&D

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It is the central question of the Lab’s newly launched Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) program.

Heralded as a bold, multi-year initiative not to just improve AI, but to elevate human flourishing in an AI-saturated world, a star-studded symposium kicked off the concept and the different research domains it will tackle. Speakers included Arianna Huffington who spoke of AI being like a ‘GPS for the soul’, and Tristan Harris who warned about systems exploiting human vulnerabilities under the guise of assistance. Both agreed that AI shouldn’t just be optimized for efficiency rather it should be designed to cultivate wisdom, resilience, and reflection. ...

Pat Pataranutaporn, co-lead of the AHA program, summed this up to the assembled audience, asking, ”What is the point of advancing artificial intelligence if we simultaneously devalue human intelligence and undermine human dignity? Instead, we should strive to design AI systems that amplify and enhance our most deeply human qualities” ...

The message is clear: it’s time to measure the wellbeing of humans not just the performance of machines. ...

As Professor Pattie Maes, co-lead of the AHA program and director of the Fluid Interfaces group, told me after the event, ‘We are creating AI and AI in turn will shape us. We don’t want to make the same mistakes we made with social media. It is critical that we think of AI as not just a technical problem for engineers and entrepreneurs to solve, but also as a human design problem, requiring the expertise from human-computer interaction designers, psychologists, and social scientists for AI to lead to beneficial impact on the human experience.’

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceyfollows/2025/04/14/mit-media-lab-to-put-human-flourishing-at-the-heart-of-ai-rd/