By: Courtney Bigony
Background: Master's in Applied Positive Psychology from Penn; a decade turning the science of thriving into technology. I believe aligning AI character to the latest science of self-actualization can measurably increase human flourishing at scale. Uncertain whether frontier AI companies are doing this today.
1. AI companies already commit to human flourishing. OpenAI's mission is to ensure AGI “benefits all of humanity.” Anthropic's constitution for Claude includes a wellbeing clause that focuses on a user’s long-term flourishing. And Dario Amodei goes even further in his essay Machines of Loving Grace, envisioning a world that “offers greater opportunities for self-actualization.” AI users want this too. When Anthropic asked 81,000 people what they most want from AI, personal transformation and wellbeing ranked at the top. These commitments are real, and so is the demand for lasting personal growth.
2. Self-actualization belongs at the center of AI character. Anthropic treats safety as a systematic science. But science shows humans require both safety and growth. Researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind recently called safety-focused alignment “necessary but incomplete.” A model can be perfectly safe without promoting human flourishing. So how can we build AI that helps people self-actualize? My guess, and it's only a guess, is that wellbeing already shapes AI character as a philosophy rather than a science. The opportunity is to shape AI character with the latest science of self-actualization.
3. A rigorous science already exists. In 1998, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi founded the field of positive psychology to develop a rigorous science of human thriving. Since then, decades of validated instruments and randomized controlled trials have identified what humans need to thrive, including resilience, high-quality relationships, autonomy, and purpose. And in the broader field of psychology, theories of human potential date back to humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. He was the first to develop a theory of self-actualization, which became popular in the 1960s at Esalen, the birthplace of the human potential movement. But Maslow died before he was able to finish his theory. Years later, Scott Barry Kaufman found Maslow's unfinished manuscripts and finished his theory with the latest science to help us understand what it means to be self-actualized in the 21st century.
I partnered with Scott Barry Kaufman and cognitive scientist Jeff Smith to develop the Human Potential Index, which is currently the most complete measure of human potential. We looked at all the needs, skills, behaviors, and mindsets central to human thriving and turned them into a single measurement. Each construct helps AI recognize a user's core unmet needs and respond with evidence-based actions that promote thriving. For example, a user asking for career advice may be seeking financial wellbeing and purpose, and the AI can use leading science to help them identify their dream career and find mission-aligned work. Labs can use the index to guide character training and build evals that measure whether users actually flourish.
4. Who will be the first to build AI that helps people self-actualize? (a) Will frontier AI companies leverage philosophy alone or leading science? (b) Should self-actualization be built into models, set by users, or offered by third-party providers? (c) For those working in AI: what's the biggest barrier to building AI that helps people flourish?
Beyond safety, AI’s next frontier is human flourishing. The first company to build AI that measurably helps people self-actualize will lead the way.
