Technology Is for Human Flourishing

For artificial intelligence, 2023 has proven to be a breakthrough year. Lawmakers in the U.S. and around the world are grappling with the policy minutiae of how to minimize potential harms while maximizing upside. It’s urgently necessary to step back to consider the role of technology in democracy writ large.

We are at a crossroads for democracy and technology. New capabilities can unleash a chaos of misinformation and fraud that could undermine our institutions; or fear of that chaos could lead in the directions of the kinds of control that underwrite autocracy. How might we navigate between those two dangers and steer toward a world we want? An emerging field known as public interest technology has the potential to help us steer technology development toward democracy and toward human flourishing everywhere.

We live in uncertain times. In the U.S., our democratic institutions are paralyzed to address pressing challenges, from violence to stagnating economic opportunity to climate change. People feel disempowered, disconnected, and alienated across urban and rural landscapes, across backgrounds of religion, culture, and race. But as a Harvard professor and democracy advocate, my work focuses on democracy: its past, its present, and its future, with no question mark at the end. It’s time for some democracy renovation.

I come by that focus honestly, as a matter of family inheritance. My granddad on my father’s side helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the 1940s when lynchings were on the rise. He took his life into his hands for the sake of democracy. On my mother’s side, my great grandfather marched with suffragettes on Boston Common in 1917, and my great grandmother served as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 1930s.

My ancestors were told that the things they sought were impossible — that social equality for African Americans in the South was impossible; that women having the right to vote was impossible. Their answer to this was that these things were not only possible, but necessary. They understood that basic political empowerment was the bedrock for human flourishing.

Following their example, I argue that the question we must ask today is not “will we save democracy?” It’s necessary to save it — for the sake of human empowerment and flourishing. The question we must ask instead is, “How can we do so?”

I'll admit that as a kid I took the value of democracy for granted. It wasn't until my own generation came up in the world that the question of democracy's value became more complicated.

In my parent’s generation, everyone in my family enjoyed upward social mobility. My granddad was a fisherman, and his kids became small business owners and professors. On the other side, my family went from being factory workers, to accountants, and so on. But my generation lived through something quite different. It's what I call the “Great Pulling Apart.” I myself am a tenured faculty member at a great university, which is an incredibly privileged role. My brother is a corporate executive. But at the same time, I have cousins who are not with us any longer, because of all the complex issues our society is struggling with: substance use disorder, incarceration, and homicide. When I lost my youngest cousin Michael in 2009, I realized that my family was living through what our entire country has been living through: While some of us enjoy great privilege and social mobility, too many others have become trapped in dire, dark circumstances.

As I was finishing my undergraduate degree, I entered a world where this Great Pulling Apart was just starting to happen. In 1992, economists, politicians, and policymakers really started naming the challenge of rising income inequality. They debated whether inequality really was increasing, and whether it mattered. But the debate should not have been as complicated as it was. My 50-plus years on this planet perfectly coincided with the graphs that show you the rise of income inequality, the rise of wealth inequality, the rise of incarceration, the rise of political polarization.

So when I lost my cousin in 2009, I began to ask myself more bluntly, “What is the value of democracy anyway?” It's not supposed to be valuable only in the abstract. Of course, we love the ideals of freedom and equality and empowerment. But we embrace those ideals because in doing so we create a society that makes it possible for each generation to move forward, for each generation to do a bit better than the ones who came before us, and for whole generational cohorts to move forward together. The question then became, “How can we change the dynamics in our society so that this democracy we have actually delivers on that promise?”

Here we are in 2023: Our students are graduating into a world that we all know is the “Age of AI,” the age of incredible technological impacts. And the most important question is whether or not that age will make those problems of the Great Pulling Apart worse, or better. Will it lead to more inequality, more polarization, more disenfranchisement, more alienation? Or is it going to be a part of the solution? I take that question to be the work of public interest technology.

“Technology is fundamentally for human flourishing, not profit.”

The work that is happening on university campuses across the country — public interest courses, research centers, and community engagement programs — are fundamental to governing innovation and governing technology so that we can address those basic dynamics that are delivering so much injustice in our society, and in fact reverse those dynamics to deliver justice instead.

There's a moment of great opportunity right now to develop students who understand how to apply the public interest technology framework across all aspects of technology. There are roles for them in the public sector, especially with funding from the CHIPS Act, and the National AI Talent Surge recently launched by the White House.

But the opportunity extends beyond the public sector. Public interest technology programs can ensure that every young person who goes into the private sector — working inside technology companies — is ready to say, technology is fundamentally for human flourishing, not profit. Of course you need sustainable revenues to support any business enterprise; but at the end of the day, technology is best understood as a tool for unlocking our ability to thrive as human beings and nothing else.

Our world and economy are shuddering under the impact of massive transitions — in the global economy, in technology, in population shifts and changes, and in the capacity of democracy societies to govern effectively and deliver responsive representation. This is a critical moment for the tech sector, one that requires supreme navigational skills. Above all, we need to drive home the lesson to future practitioners and technologists, that technology is a tool for the public good. This is the north star toward which we must steer. We must invite the leaders of tomorrow to ask: How can we harness this tool for the greater good? How can we enlist those in the private, for-profit sector as partners to help us address some of the most difficult challenges of our time? Our network of public interest technology universities are necessary leaders for this work.

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