Flourishing

And they've not only blessed you, but they've blessed others that you sought to help.

So freedom really does allow for human flourishing in a way that socialism does not because you exist and your accomplishments exist in a context of freedom.

Speak to that for a moment.

Yes.

And if those bombs are just sitting in a warehouse and they're not being blown up, Well, then these deals aren't getting made to make new bombs.

And often I think, yeah, the incentives of the system are not in favor of human flourishing and cooperation.

And I'm not sitting here saying Bitcoin is this panacea and that, you know, Bitcoin is going to fix everything.

But I do think over the long arc of history, it incentivizes more cooperation because in the past, you know, even now today, if you go to war and you win, you can take someone's land, you can take their resources, et cetera.

Hey, either you pay this or we're going to throw you in a cage.

But I do think that I would feel a lot better about my taxes if I had confidence that it was going to the schools and the roads and all the things that people who, for whatever reason, love taxes seem to argue for.

And yet often it seems like, no, my taxes are going to, you know, bomb people all over the world and It's very unfortunate to see, so I'm hopeful that technology can be a forcing function to incentivize governments to actually increase human flourishing and cooperate.

Force them, essentially.

And I think the other thing I would point to here is...

When I think of human flourishing, there's a lot of kind of non-economic factors I think of, right? Family formation, community, civil society, how robust those things are, right? How happy people feel generally.

I think actually housing, which is an economic issue, impacts those other things quite a bit.

When you think of something like accessory dwelling units, starter homes and things like that, I mean – Young people who might be delaying marriage, they might be delaying family formation, they might not be able to live near friends or employment opportunities or they might choose not to get engaged in civil society because they're being priced out of homes.

I mean that's a real sort of economic and non-economic impact on the American dream and on human flourishing that I think, again, is relatively straightforward to solve.

It just takes a modicum of understanding and courage to do so.

Yeah.

And while the technology itself is morally neutral, its use is not.

AI must be understood as a valuable tool which can be employed to either assist and promote human flourishing or to impede this flourishing.

And I suppose then from a cognitive science perspective, when we talk about flourishing, we talk about attention, memory, what deep learning is.

What are some of the markers then that can help protect us from those kind of areas of AI that maybe are against human morals?

Now, Emmy's insights are grounded in experience and training, including Yale's The Science of Wellbeing course.

She is a happiness facilitator and RSA fellow, teaches a Domestika course on sustainable branding, and she has contributed to the AI for Human Flourishing think tank at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

In this conversation, you'll hear about Emi's dual creative life, both in the bustling city of London, UK, as well as the rural countryside of Portugal and how both places affect her creativity in different ways.

You'll also hear about the process of not only writing, but also designing her book, the Creative Wellbeing Handbook, and how she worked with the layout in unconventional ways.