Who's AI For, Anyway?

Key Insights from MIT Media Lab’s "AI for Human Flourishing" Symposium

Author

Natalie Monbiot
April 16, 2025

In today’s issue:

Who’s AI For, Anyway?

With Pat Pat: Co-director of the AHA Advancing Humans With AI Program. PS he always wears this coat as he’s been obsessed with dinosaurs since a child.

The MIT Media Lab launched a new Program: AHA: Advancing Humans with AI, and I was delighted to attend the Symposium, addressing what I believe to be the most important question of our time:

“Can we design AI to support human flourishing?”

I could not have agreed more with the premise - that the AI community is almost solely focused on reaching AGI - but few are asking how we can optimize the design of AI to serve people.

But after attending, a deeper and more existential question landed:

“Do we believe humans are worth designing AI for?”

As Jaron Lanier put it: “You have to believe people are special enough to be that beneficiary. That’s a faith—not something you can derive from science.”

That belief isn’t universal. A DeepMind engineer, another attendee I met over lunch, told me: “AI is a tool. We design for the user, not the human race.”

That’s the truth - and also the problem. Today we optimize for clicks, speed, and scale—but not for dignity, agency, or humans-as-beneficiary. What we measure defines what we build. And that’s why the AHA at MIT Media Lab "Moonshot: Human Flourishing Benchmarks" matters. It will offer a framework to build and evaluate AI with humanity at the center—not as an afterthought.

But metrics alone aren’t enough. It also requires the Ethical Mind: the capacity to face complex issues with no right answers —and make thoughtful, responsible choices the best we can.

I unpack all of this in my latest blog post which you can read in full here. 

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“You have to believe people are special enough to be that beneficiary. That’s a faith—not something you can derive from science.”

Jaron Lanier, at the MIT Media Lab AHA Symposium

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