AI must serve human flourishing

For the rest of us, the answer should be clear. AI exists to promote human flourishing.

Beginning with the founders’ recognition of the “pursuit of happiness” as an unalienable right, American society has long been oriented toward advancing human dignity, prosperity, and the development of individual potential. Technology must always serve that mission, and AI must be developed following core human values. This is especially the case because a developer’s choice of what to optimize, prioritize, and ignore has the capacity to shape the future of our society.

Although developers are already making these choices, they often do so unilaterally with total opacity. This means that we place a significant amount of trust in their design. We are trusting that when they train an algorithm to maximize engagement, their system won’t favor outrage over truth to encourage more user engagement.

Tech companies often treat safety as an afterthought, which has created bias and harmful content that can scale at unprecedented speed. These are not accidents, but reflections of underlying corporate values. Indeed, AI operates at such a scale that those judgments reverberate across entire markets, institutions, and communities.

That is why human morality must be embedded at the system’s inception. If we intentionally design systems that respect human dignity, reinforce community, and promote shared prosperity, AI could become man’s greatest ally — rather than his reckoning.

So how do we shape a human-flourishing AI agenda?

First, we must reject the idea that efficiency is the highest good. A society that maximizes productivity at the expense of job security, family stability, or affordability is a deeply broken one. AI should augment and promote human labor, not replace it. In fact, its greatest promise lies in freeing workers from dangerous or dehumanizing tasks, such as bomb disposal, deep mining, coding, or nuclear cleanup. Offloading this to machines can mean that those workers can lead fuller, safer lives with their families. This is a great thing, and we should encourage it.

Second, we must have a strict focus on the institutions that advance the concept of human dignity — chief among them, the promotion of the nuclear family. For centuries, thinkers from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas have recognized that the family is the foundation of a stable society. The logic is simple: Strong families make strong citizens, ensuring free institutions. AI policy should reflect that reality by ensuring parents remain in charge of their children’s development. That means applying real guardrails, such as age verification and increased operational transparency, to AI applications most accessed by children. If left unchecked, AI systems could influence children in ways that undermine their parents’ values, relationships, and identity.

Third, AI policy must address everyday economic concerns that often get overlooked. We should enact policies that incentivize AI players to find ways to lower our cost of living rather than raise it. One thing a human-centered AI policy should not do is enable dominant firms to manipulate prices or consolidate power. Promotion of competition is preeminent here.

Finally, AI must serve to protect our nation. This technology will play a central role in national defense, and ensuring that it is developed and deployed in alignment with American interests is essential. But the partnership cannot be one-sided. If the government is going to engage with AI companies or leverage their systems, then it must be those accountable to the public.

In sum, the AI revolution is a moral moment. If we fail to ground AI systems in a coherent vision of human flourishing, we risk building a future that is more efficient but less human. We need to reject a false binary that forces us to choose between transparency and accountability on one hand, and innovation on the other. Such measures are prerequisites for public trust. Without them, AI risks becoming a force that subtly erodes human agency, concentrates power, and weakens the social fabric it is supposed to strengthen.

Joel Thayer serves as a senior fellow for AI and emerging technology at the America First Policy Institute.