Focusing AI on Learning and Flourishing – Some Key Metrics

The mission of Team Human (previously H-Corps) is to ensure human flourishing is at the center of society in the age of AI by designing systems that empower people, protect dignity, and broadly share the benefits of technology. Achieving that mission means honestly facing both the opportunities AI creates and the concerns it raises.

Moving beyond fear doesn’t mean embracing AI without question. It means engaging with it honestly enough to have the conversation, instead of treating AI as either the enemy or the answer. This post explores that question through one lens: learning. What does it mean to learn in a way that helps us thrive, rather than just getting efficient, and where does AI support that versus undermine it?

AI has enormous potential to expand and accelerate human flourishing. There is a significant untapped opportunity here. Addressing this opportunity requires alignment and action among those who are applying this technology tool in various aspects of their lives.

Human flourishing is a very broad umbrella, covering many different dimensions of our lives. Rather than attempt to explore the entire umbrella, this post suggests that a key pillar in the umbrella is learning.

For humans to flourish, we all must find ways to grow, and a key driver of growth is learning. To grow most effectively in a rapidly changing world, we need to expand our view of learning. When most people talk about learning today, they focus on learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge. It can occur through reading or sitting in a training room listening to an expert share the knowledge that they already have.

But, here’s the challenge. In a rapidly changing world, existing knowledge is becoming obsolete at an accelerating rate. If all we are doing is sharing existing knowledge, we will experience significant limits to our growth and potential for flourishing.

There’s another form of learning that needs to be the focus for human flourishing in a rapidly changing world. That is learning in the form of creating new knowledge that did not exist before. This does not occur through reading or sitting in a training room. It occurs in our everyday lives as we encounter new situations that raise new opportunities or problems.

For example, a call center operator could address an unexpected question from a customer that had never been encountered before but that emerges from a new situation the customer is experiencing. A janitor might discover that occupants of an office are interacting in new ways and come up with a creative idea to rearrange the facility to support these new interactions. A procurement employee might encounter a disruption in the supply chain and come up with a creative approach to sourcing the missing parts that had never been tried before.

When we come up with approaches that help us to achieve greater impact that is meaningful to ourselves and other participants, we will see the potential of learning in the form of creating new knowledge and discover what it really means to flourish.

AI can be very helpful in supporting this new form of learning. It can help us to cultivate a range of capabilities that are essential to support this new form of learning. These capabilities include curiosity, imagination, creativity and the ability to connect with others.

If we focus on this form of learning to support human flourishing, we can develop ways to measure where and when AI is helping us to pursue this form of learning. We can begin by identifying where and when we encounter new situations that raise new opportunities and problems. We can then identify if AI has helped us in any way to address these new opportunities and problems and whether it helped us to deliver more value as we develop new approaches to dealing with these situations.

We can be more specific regarding what role, if any, AI played in helping us to cultivate the capabilities required to pursue this new form of learning. We can ask whether AI was helpful in stimulating our curiosity, imagination, creativity or connection as we explored ways to address these new opportunities and problems.

Addressing an important barrier

One of the challenges in unleashing the potential of AI to support human flourishing, and specifically new forms of learning, is that we live and work in environments that are somewhat skeptical about, if not hostile to, these new forms of learning. Especially in large organizations there is a focus on scalable efficiency – just doing the tightly defined and highly standardized tasks more rapidly and not wasting time on other tasks. The capabilities that were mentioned are not viewed as very relevant to the assigned tasks. These capabilities are largely confined to people working in research labs or innovation centers, but the vast majority of workers are expected to focus on tightly defined tasks and pursue learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge so that they can do these tasks even more quickly and accurately.

Supporting new forms of learning at scale will also require transforming large organizations at a fundamental level. These organizations need to embrace cultures and management practices that encourage all their participants to seek out and address new problems and opportunities that have the potential to increase impact in a rapidly changing world.

Key metrics should include how many organizations' participants have sought to engage AI as a catalyst for transformation. For each of these organizations, metrics should also track how many workers have chosen to use AI to address new problems and opportunities. They should also capture the impact these initiatives have had in terms of value created for participants and stakeholders in the organization.

Bottom line

While there are many dimensions to human flourishing, a key dimension is to focus much more on learning in the form of creating new knowledge. Key metrics can help us to track where and how AI is being used as a tool to support this form of learning. On a related front, metrics can help us to measure our progress in evolving new institutional environments that will embrace this form of learning.