Video: Humanity Meets AI: AI and Society

March 27, 2025

How might AI influence our understanding of humanity, morality, and meaning-making? How will religious traditions and communities adapt to or shape the ethical frameworks guiding AI development? In what ways can religious perspectives contribute to the creation of a more equitable society amid the disruptions AI will bring to labor, governance, and social structures?

Religion and Public Life hosted a symposium that explored the profound ways in which artificial intelligence is reshaping human society, with a particular emphasis on the role of religion, the transformation of societal structures and capitalism, and strategies to reduce inequities as society responds to the sweeping changes brought about by AI.

The symposium equipped our audience with the tools and frameworks to critically engage with the ethical, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of this transformation. In an age increasingly influenced by AI, this symposium helped identify practical opportunities to shape a more humane and just society.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

AI and Society February 27, 2025.

JAMES: Everyone, if I can get your attention, we're going to jump into the next panel. I am going to introduce the panelists while we are getting their mics on. I will begin with Dr. Jonathan Teubner, who is the Founder and CEO of FilterLabs, a data analytics company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also serves as research faculty at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, where he leads the social connectedness research group within the Human Flourishing Program.

Dr. Teubner, whose academic journey includes a master's degree from Yale University and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has held fellowships at esteemed institutions such as the Sorbonne, Humboldt-Universitat Berlin and Yale University. In addition to his roles at FilterLabs and Harvard, Dr. Teubner has served as research fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry of the Australian Catholic University, and is Associate Director of the Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Conflict at the University of Virginia.

His diverse experience spans academia, business, and nonprofit sectors, with a focus on applying data-driven methods to reduce and prevent religion-related violence.

Dr. Teubner's work has been featured in prominent media outlets, including the New York TIMES, the Economist, and the Hill. He is regularly consulted by senior policymakers in the US and the UK. And his insights have been sought by the BBC, CNN, Scripps News, and NBC Nightly News. Through his leadership at FilterLabs.AI, Dr. Teubner continues to bridge the gap between local realities and global strategies, transforming hard-to-reach data into insights that drive strategic decision-making and shape global narratives. Thank you, Dr. Teubner, for joining us today.

Senator Alessandra Biaggi is an American politician from New York and activist who served as a New York State Senator for the 34th district from 2019 to 2022, representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester counties. She is also the granddaughter of former US Congressman Mario Biaggi. She has her BS from New York University and her JD from Fordham Law School. I should also note that she is a current student here at HDS in the Master of Religion and Public Life Program with me. She's one of my classmates.

During her tenure in the state Senate, Senator Biaggi chaired the ethics and internal governance committee. Within her first two months in office, she led the first public hearings in 27 years on workplace sexual harassment, and championed legislation to strengthen protections for survivors while holding employers accountable for addressing misconduct. Senator Biaggi's leadership in the Ethics Committee was instrumental in revamping the state's approach to internal governance and ethical oversight, reflecting her commitment to transparency and accountability in New York's legislative processes.

Finally, Nat Barling is an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, co-leading the firm's applied software group. ASG builds intelligent investing and company-building software. Prior to joining a16z, Nat was co-founder and CEO of Nowhere. That's how I know him. I was the first institutional investor in his company. When I think I can say publicly that I think he was sleeping on the floor of his co-founders. I don't know if it was a dorm or an apartment at Stanford.

NAT BARLING: James bought me my first bed.

JAMES: That's right. I apparently bought him more mattress bed, something like that. Sleep is very important for everybody, especially entrepreneurs. But everybody. So nowhere he led a team that built large language models. So he was early in this to analyze and generate online news content, serving over a million subscribers in the US with daily national and local coverage.

Nowhere was acquired by a16z in May of 2022. Prior to founding Nowhere in 2014, Nathanael worked in investment banking and private equity at Deutsche Bank and Oaktree Capital in London, where he focused on M&A, capital raises, and buyouts for technology, media, telecoms, and health companies. I know that you all are shocked that he's British. You could not have possibly told that. And this is fun. If I can get it to work, which I'm only--

SPEAKER 5: Good afternoon, distinguished guests, ladies, and gentlemen. This is my first time in Dubai. And it is an absolute privilege to be a part of this vibrant dialogue in this extraordinary city. I'm here to talk about the automation of the news business. I believe that this advance is not only inevitable, but a necessary part of a trustworthy and independent press in the modern world, without which this cornerstone of civil society is at risk.

I say to you that we must not fear the rise of the robots in this arena if we are to protect the open society. In the early 19th century, the German philosopher Hegel suggested that societies become modern when news replaces religion as the central source of guidance in our daily lives. The news sets the priorities of public debate, informing our collective civic duty and shaping our impressions of the world, both within and most importantly, beyond our immediate horizons.

It shapes our sense of what's important, what is worth forming opinions on and discussing, and what problems society must focus on finding answers to. We don't necessarily need to agree on how to fix them. But it's critical we have an open discourse so that innovative and workable solutions can be found. Facts about what is going on in our world are our axioms.

The touchstone with reality that enables citizens, organizations, governments, and their leaders to make decisions that enable a better future. In short, news is the chief creator of our social and political reality. As such, we need sources of information about the world that everyone can trust, no matter their belief system or their role in society.

JAMES: I just want to frame this conversation by saying that, everyone, we have on the panel here today. Everyone comes from a different domain. But everybody here has done work that involves information and society's understanding at large. Dr. Teubner's work has done a lot of different things. But his work at filter labs involves understanding what people think, understanding what society thinks at scale, something which is as obviously thoughts can spread really quickly in the world today at literally at the speed of light or pretty close to it.

Senator Biaggi's work in society has involved what people think, what people believe, policy, how we govern society. So everyone here has been doing work that involves information at societal scale. So I would like to begin the first question that I have for everyone. And I'd like to go just in order, the order that people are seated and getting these responses.

But my first question for everyone, because this conversation can turn very dark and dystopian really quickly is, what are you excited about with AI? What is something positive, something with the technological transformations that makes you happy, that you're optimistic about?

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: Well, first off, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. Well, I guess we're talking about AI. We're often talking about what's happened in the LLM space. There are some interesting things emerging from that, and particularly, the way it gets productized into what now we engage with chatbots and things like that. If that's the focus, I probably am skeptical on a lot of respect levels that there's actually something there that's going to really help right now, or I could get really excited about.

And part of it is they have created a very simple user interface over a very complicated product. And they've obscured the ways in which we could become really good at using it right now. What I would be excited about is in the chatbot space, particularly a revolution around user interface of making its complexity more transparent, more able to engage in more ways. So if we can turn the corner to thinking about that, I think I could get really excited about what's going on.

But at the current place where we are, we have a very simplified UI that obscures everything going on and ways in which we could utilize it in really exciting ways. I think there's a different answer when we throw in artificial intelligence broader, like things going on in very specific verticals, and sectors. Those are really cool. The sector I know best is in the defense world, that stuff. I think there's a lot of cool stuff going on there. That is controversial, of course. But are going to change a lot of things in that sense.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: That's a great answer. And what I will say is that I love that you started with optimism because we all need a lot of it. When it comes to we do, AI and what I feel optimistic about, I'm going to dovetail a little bit off of what you've just said, and then talk about it through the lens of government.

I really do think that if we use AI in a way that is incredibly efficient, that we can actually make space for the things I think that humans are especially and particularly good at, which is imagination, and dreaming, and connecting with others and intimacy.

Now, I'm sure there's an argument to be made about the intimacy that one can have with AI. But that's not where I'm going today.

But I do think that finding a way for each and every one of us to interact with AI so that we can eliminate the things in our lives that, frankly, don't necessarily the process doesn't work on us to become better humans. It actually just gets in the way of the things that we are here to create. So that's the first thing.

And I would say the second thing is how much possibility I think there is about communicating what legislators do and what government elected officials do to the people that they represent.

And I think that's especially important because lots and lots of bills are passed all the time across this country. And a majority of people, even the ones who are paying very close attention will never really know what bills actually impact their lives. And part of that is a communication interaction that I think has to be updated.

And perhaps, AI can be one of those places that we do that. But I think that it will help us if we use it with ethics in a way that actually can improve our human interactions with each other. I'm really digging very deep to find optimism, just so you all know, on this.

[LAUGHTER]

NAT BARLING: So I think my answer to this. Well, firstly, speaking to optimism and pessimism, I totally agree. Thanks for starting it off on that note, James. Pessimism will be a self-fulfilling prophecy if we all succumb to it. So we have to keep a positive mindset here. What I am most excited about, it's maybe a little bit more boring than what you've both commented on.

But it is what I work on every single day at the moment. I'm not as excited about the stuff that I was working on before I sold the company, because that I don't see the world going too much in that direction. But what I'm working on right now is resource allocation. I think that the advances we have made in artificial intelligence are opening up a new chapter in how well we can allocate resources on this planet.

And what I mean by that specifically are financial resources and labor resources. I think we can help people find the work they find the most meaning in. And I think we really we've got a huge opportunity in front of us on that. And that's what I'm spending most of my energy on these days.

JAMES: Thank you. Thank you all for those initial comments. So I think one way to conceive of what our brains are is that they are information processing and really information filtering systems of all of the inputs that your brain gets very, very little is entering your consciousness, what you're actively thinking about. And even that which is informing your subconscious is very heavily filtered.

And one of the implications of the current information technology age that we're in is that potential information that we have access to is extraordinarily large. The amount of information, digital information that's being created is greater than anything can reasonably filter.

It's greater than most even human algorithms can effectively filter. And what has inevitably happened now is that we do have different types, I think, what you could broadly call AI algorithms, which are playing a really crucial role in serving as an external system, that is filtering the information that is coming to each and every one of us.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts on each of you, again, on this idea of that effectively this information filter, the filter bubble. Sometimes people talk about. And I know Dr. Teubner, that some of your work has really very directly worked on this. So I'd love to hear your thoughts first and for others to build on that.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: So, well, I guess, I probably wouldn't start with the human mind being an information filtration. I think that I guess that would be somewhat similar to the computational theory of mind or something like that, which is the basic presumption of I think most people in the world.

It's certainly the assumption of most technologies, particularly those who are making claims about radical advances in machine intelligence. When they're comparing it to human intelligence, they're thinking there's something like information processing going on. I guess I would probably start with-- and you might need to redirect me to the actual question I need to answer here.

I'd probably start with the human beings as doers in embodied in flesh doers that way. And part of that is not only like receiving, processing, but creating information that then creates these new realities itself. But what was the question that you wanted me to--

JAMES: It was intended as a bit of a provocation to see what your thoughts are without-- I was trying not to be too leading into this is good or a bad, or this is the type of information that people should get. But I was curious to get because you've done work in that field. [INAUDIBLE] mind for you.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: Well, I mean, I think people receiving and interacting with local information is superior to non-local information. If I were to throw my cards on the table and say what's good? And a lot of respects where there's really interesting promise in the AI field is bringing having relocalization.

And that being possible. I think that's actually one of the best insights from Azeem Azhar's work wrote the exponential age was like, there's this relocalization possible. I think that's really good. Because what they have are conditions in which they can be like meaningful, acted upon, verified all of that information, when you separate the information from things outside of it, that becomes more and more difficult.

If I were to say this is good information versus this is bad information, I wouldn't make too many judgments or I wouldn't want to start out making too many judgments in the categories of malinformation, things along those. I wish we wouldn't actually start there in this conversation at all.

NAT BARLING: It's a dangerous place to start.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: I would rather us start talking about information is something that occurs or geographically located and thinking about its localization in our world and that way. And the lines that you have between this malinformation and all these other things are hard in the actual cases there. And obviously, there's also the problem of talking about and conceptualizing it. Most people think there's some form of synonym. Those three can be used interchangeably. They're not.

NAT BARLING: On a slippery slope if government starts defining them.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: So I guess if I were to put my cards on the table on something, it would be that. And I guess I just always found it to be somewhat idiotic to and start with the conversations around these framing of [INAUDIBLE] this.

NAT BARLING: There's something I definitely doubled down on there that I strongly agree with, which is that idea.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: Because I disagree. So this is perfect.

[LAUGHTER]

NAT BARLING: So I strongly I strongly agree with the positive notion of relocalization. That was actually something we worked on an awful lot with Noah with my previous company. I haven't seen anybody execute it extremely well in the time since. I'm not saying we had executed it extremely well. There were definitely things to learn from that.

But I do think with the breakdown in local information sources that we've just generally seen over the last 100 years in the press, more and more of the conversation of public discourse has shifted to abstract, national, and international level things that don't actually impact people's lives on a day-to-day basis.

I think that is in large part a direct result of the loss of local relevant information to my daily life actually being there and available. And so I'm really excited about opportunities to leverage AI that will enable that information flow to thrive again. Those kinds of organizations just don't have the resources today to put reporters on the ground in their local communities. That model is broken. It's gone.

And so I think there are huge opportunities to explore what can be done with AI in that realm. And it alludes to some of the other things folks have talked about today. But that grounding in the context of the things you live within. That is so much of where meaning comes from. I do think local information flows are absolutely critical to that. No, no, please. You said you disagree. I want to hear it.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: This is what I think about. I think that the localization aspect of it is exactly spot on. There's a decimation of local news. And even the local news that has existed cannot cover everything. I think it was probably only two or three years ago that the New York Times said they no longer were going to include New York in their political section. I thought that was incredibly dangerous, especially to places like Albany, which functions and works in the dark.

Albany is the state capital. And any place that is left in the dark and people can't see further into, I think that causes a lot of damage. The area that I disagree on is the misinformation, disinformation and you said mal-- malinformation, bad information, or misappropriated, or misassigned.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: Some have to do with indirect agency, direct agency framing.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: So maybe I'm only interpreting this from the way in which my frame can hear what you're saying. And so I have blind spots. So I just I preface it with that. The place I disagree is I think that having the ability to have some-- we lack so much, I think right now a place to go for morality. Yes, there's religion. And yes, people use politics as religion.

And they use all these other sources to fill the gap of meaning. And so when we're interacting with information at the speed upon which we're at, we're interacting with information. And we are seeing it at these clips that are just unbelievably fast. And we're responding. And those things stay there. And people see them and they cause harm, or they cause joy.

Mostly, they cause harm, I find. But the point is, if we don't enable some tool to help people that are not as privileged, frankly, I mean, really to have the time to do their own research about what they're seeing and interacting with, to understand whether that thing was true or not. And also to have the resources to perhaps even continue their education, to have learned critical thinking of how to engage with media.

Because we're a country that doesn't even teach that. Other places in the world are doing, which is so brilliant to watch children being given information and then being taught, OK, what's real? And talk about that. And how do you interact with that? I think that without those tools, without that foundation.

I would be more on the positive of that if we actually had a foundation at cultural level, where we're instilling in people that this critical discerning eye to engage with media. So it's a disagreement. It's a disagreement two generations away from what I would hope to have happened in our society on it.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: I mean, I guess we see in these-- I mean, I wouldn't want to be taken as denial of the existence of these types of information. They've been around. They're not new. They've been accelerated. They're accessible. A lot of respects with the platform effects and other things that we have here on it is that you-- and I think you were touching on this when someone learns what is real, what is accurate.

They're having to process that in the context in which they live. And they do. We all process information better that comes from the context in which we have some familiarity to it. And what you see in-- so at FilterLabs, we track an awful lot of information campaigns. We're probably best known for what we do tracking stuff in Russia. We do a lot in China. We do all of that.

And one thing that's pretty persistent is that it's like whether it's like a Kremlin campaign operation or something coming out of the Communist Party in China is that they're trying to distract away from local issues. And often, they're throwing in very national or global issues in front of them.

And the types of information out there, or rather more the types of communication out there that we would then classify in these categories of misdeeds or malinformation are often those informational vectors that are national, international in topic that are trying to obscure something at the local level there. And one of the best things that I've seen people do in countering this has been trying to filter out some of those from people to keep them focused on the local.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: I think that is a righteous cause. I completely agree with you.

NAT BARLING: Some of my problem with the misinformation, disinformation stuff is from the data that we looked at back in the nowhere days. It's usually labeled as that by someone who doesn't agree with it. That's the fundamental.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: That's a fair point. Important, actually.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: Real problem with the Global Engagement Center, which was a bad idea from the beginning, I think.

NAT BARLING: To come back to your original concept of your question, James, I think one of the things I am worried about is that filter bubbles, as conceived of over the last 10 years, seem to be getting stronger with the ease of generating content now. You can generate content for such niches that it's so easy to stay within your space as a consumer, as a user, within things that confirm your biases already.

The flip side of that is that it's become easier to express yourself than it's ever been, which is a glorious thing, in my opinion. And one of the amazing things that AI enables, the recent advances in AI enable. So it's not a black or white question in my mind. These things are bidirectional and closely related. But yeah, those would be two comments on it.

JAMES: It's interesting. So a good friend of mine, I won't name him because of what I'm about to say, but he's a Russian descent, a Brit. He lived in America, probably will live in America for the rest of his life. His wife is of Chinese descent. They recently had a baby. So he spends a lot of time. He goes to Russia. He goes to England. He spends time here. And he also goes and visits his wife's family in China quite a lot.

And so he has a pretty unique perspective. I'm not sure there are a lot of people that are regularly in China, Russia, and the US. And something that he said recently. I mean, he loves America. He's very pro-America. He's a US citizen now. But he's like, people are much more at ease in Russia and China is his opinion. He thinks that his view is that it seems like life is a lot easier. There are information constraints, unless you're really actively looking to figure out what's going on outside in the rest of the world.

And you're probably not going to know. And his view is that most people don't care. And I mean, I've certainly heard. I don't think many people in the US would say this in public. But I've heard a lot of people who I know who work in politics, who work on both sides of the aisle. I don't think it's a partisan thing who are somewhat envious of the information controls that exist now in other places in other parts of the world.

Not normatively in the US. We really value the freedom of press, the freedom of information. We love this idea of democratized free access to information. But we also see the potential harms that can come from it in reinforcing our own biases in the way that different types of information that we might view as being harmful can spread. I mean, what do you all think about that?

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: I have a perspective on this that I think is probably very antithetical-- 50% of it is antithetical to the political party from which I come. And the other part is probably very much aligned. And I think that I don't like the idea of controlling information flow. I think it starts a dangerous precedent. And I also think that you can never guarantee that the person, or people, or group of people, community, government, organization, whatever it might be who's controlling it.

You cannot always guarantee that there are going to be people of good faith or with good intentions. That being said, I think that we do have a responsibility as those of us who engage with creating AI, or in influencing AI, or in even legislating around AI, which I honestly think is probably never going to happen because we haven't even figured out a way to navigate and to legislate around social media in a way that makes any sense. Because people that represent us are just not met and made for this moment. But it's not a political panel. It's OK.

[LAUGHTER]

I do think when it comes to children, we have a larger responsibility. And I think the thing that concerns me the most is that there's such an incredible opportunity for children to engage with things like Khan Academy and to have that. We were talking about this yesterday. Imagine children that are falling behind that have this one-on-one interaction. And I can now become a better math student. Or whatever it is that you need help with, that is amazing. I think that maybe the teachers unions will in the way of that. That's a problem Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know, maybe they'll love it.

The point being, that's an area where it's like, yes, check the box. I'm signing up for that. I'm disappointed more than terrified because terror paralyzes you is the place where you're like, children are interacting with iPads because it's inevitable. It is in the classrooms in ways that we didn't even have this technology. And they're going on websites that seem fine and OK. And the craziest, most insane, most dark.

I've gone through this world as if I was like a child to see what pops up. It's insane stuff. Things like messages telling children to kill their mothers. I mean, just crazy things like that just really stop you in your tracks and make you think like. First of all, what do you even do if you're a parent whose child says, look what I just saw? Or what if the child doesn't tell you?

Because we haven't given them the tools to even communicate around technology, because we haven't given them the tools to communicate around media literacy either.

So I don't know what the answer is. But this to me is a question and a space where it would probably make sense to draw some boundaries.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: This is quite something I've been thinking about. with a couple of colleagues, one here at Harvard as well as a couple at USC just put together and finished a report on chatbot use with children for the G20 there. And everything that we have learned about over a relatively short period of time, which does need to be stated upfront about those engagements is very negative on it.

And there is, I think, a fairly clear consensus and ran this event out in San Francisco that Tom Preston-Werner some investor out there. One of my investors, we hosted this event together. We ended up bringing together. Some people in the chatbot space and some social scientists like Sherry Turkle around this.

And it seemed that everyone was even Eugenia, CEO of Replika, was converging on this consensus that children need to be protected.

And so there is an opportunity to do it. I share your pessimism on the prospects of regulation. Well, I think they're going to try to do something. It's going to probably be counterproductive. But I think we do have this moment. And I think we could move something on it.

NAT BARLING: The thing I'd add there is, I think, I totally agree with both of you in terms of the need to protect children from harms in this space. The thing I would add is that we should really be looking at what those harms are and regulating against those harms, not necessarily regulating the systems, and how they are built. And we shouldn't regulate models and the development of the technology in order to try and avoid certain harms. We should regulate against those.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: That's important because in the [INAUDIBLE] he stated it, it'd be hard to follow. It'd be hard to accept. You shouldn't regulate what their use to regulate the harms. But what if what they created is the harm? But the second thing you said is like something I think we need to be more specific about and is around like we're not going to regulate models.

NAT BARLING: Technological infrastructure.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: When people say that it feels like they don't actually understand the industry.

NAT BARLING: And they don't understand how the technology is built and so on.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: And all this stuff. No, we're not going to have model-level regulation. We're going to have age-level regulations around it. We're going to have gating on it. We do that already. And obviously, with pornographic sites do this, you can do this. You can introduce a lot of this. You can do it on certain features and functionalities on that stuff. All of those can be done. But the underlying models need to be liberated to some extent.

NAT BARLING: To some extent. Come back to your point about I thought it was interesting. You mentioned the jealousy of controlled information flows. It's fascinating. I see that come up a lot as well. I think it's generally speaking folks looking for an easy way out of just the constant gridlock and difficulty of politics in the United States. And I think that's generally true in freer, more open societies where we have an open dialogue and open competition of ideas.

And we need that. As much as we may envy the ease of government implementation in other countries, I envy how quickly China can build a train station. There is a reason why it's not as quick here. And it's because we have an open debate, an open competition of ideas. And we should treasure that. And it may slow us down. But it's part of what's made the country great in the first place. So let's be very careful about protecting it.

JAMES: I believe that AI should promote human flourishing, which is an incredibly true, but also an interesting thing to say, because it's a bit like saying, I think there should be world peace. It's like, OK, thank you, Mother Theresa. That's great. So, of course, I think most people would probably agree that that's true. But my question to all of you. And after this, I think I'll turn to questions from the audience is, how do we do that? How do we ensure that AI promotes human flourishing?

And I know there could be a million answers to this. But I'm really curious to hear what feels most true. And this can be what's top of mind or comes up first. But we've heard from Professor Bagaria as framing and from Professor Reece's talk a lot of different ways to think about the impacts of AI and how it changes society. But I mean, I would love to hear, what's your answer to that? How do we promote human flourishing with AI in the context of AI?

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: I guess at the Human Flourishing Program here at Harvard, we're just launching this AI and flourishing initiative. So we've been doing a little bit of thinking around this. And there's a lot to say about specifics on it, of course. But I guess where I would start is I want to make sure that how we define flourishing is holistic enough.

Flourishing is this buzz-term right now. Everyone's saying it. And it's really taken over well-being and happiness studies. And that's just from a lot of it has roots in positive psychology and some of these disciplines. They're all fine and well. But for the concept of flourishing to really move and actually change something, it has to be much more than like what's going on the internal, psychological, and maybe even like physical health of us individually.

We need to understand both the ways in which our relational communities are doing. We need to understand. But another aspect of it is our financial stability as well. And there's a framework here quite prominent by the Tyler VanderWeele at the Chan School. He has six domains. And I think that's a really good starting point on it.

I think there's some ways in which we have to think a little bit further about AI in these contexts on it there.

And so the way in which we have to think about AI I think is going to be along-- and AI and for flourishing is that we're going to be like weighing some advantages in some sectors and disadvantages in others, some risks, some benefits around it.

And the only way that we're actually going to, I think, make some movement on this is if we have something holistic enough that we can say, yes, it's going to have some positive financial benefits. Those aren't quite simple. They're intrigued about the work you're doing, about redistribution of labor. It sounds like, to some extent, that's a fascinating.

NAT BARLING: I mean, that's a way of framing.

JONATHAN D. TEUBNER: So that's one thing. But there's dislocations and things like that are going to be problematic. There's going to be mental health issues that are going to be there. But there's going to be a lot of health benefits on another side. And so if it's going to be for flourishing, it's got to be for this whole package. We can't narrow it down to just thinking about whether it's making us more anxious, lonely, and stuff like that, which is really significant.

And we shouldn't ignore that. But it's got to be bigger than that, if it's going to be for flourishing. Because if we set it up that way, we're going to find, particularly in these narrow ways, we're going to probably find it's going to be a net negative.

ALESSANDRA BIAGGI: This made me think of so many different vectors to go off of. But I'll try to be really succinct and quick so we can get to the questions. I think that, first and foremost, in order for it to even answer the question about human flourishing, I think that educational institutions need to embrace AI instead of push it away. I think it's been an interesting experience. I haven't been a student since law school. It's been a long time. And things have changed in the world.

And so coming here, it's interesting. There's a variated relationship that people have to using AI as students. And on the one hand, I completely understand because the process of writing works on you in a way that changes you. And on the other hand, sometimes there's things that you might not be so interested in, but maybe you have to write.

But maybe it might be helpful to have something else to help you to do that thing. I'm not saying to have the thing right for you. But the point is we, first and foremost need to learn as students in institutions that have really smart people here to tell us what is the ethical way to engage with these kinds of models.

And I think that the second piece of it is-- and this is really where I'm most interested in and how I use it today. I am like the kid who on the prom was like asking about philosophy in the limo. And people were like, shut that up.

We were trying to party and have fun.

This is so annoying. Please stop. And so I'm like, OK. So over the years, I've found my people in little places. And I'm like, oh, you want to talk to me about these weird issues and questions that I have. And James indulges me a lot, which I appreciate. But I find that you can ask so many of these LLMs questions, that then it will give back information that makes me go down.

It's having footnotes at the end of a paper. You're going to go through all those breadcrumbs, and find all these new thinkers, and places, and things.

Now, I can use it responsibly because I know where my limits are on where I'm willing to let it take me, and where I'm willing to take the wheel, and actually make my own decisions about thinking.

But I think that this is a place where we can find a center to answer big questions around morality and ethics. And when you're in institutions that may be unethical and how to engage in those things as an ethical person. So you can ask that question in a way that's really private in quotes, private, you and the thing. But obviously, other people can potentially see it.

NAT BARLING: I love the question. It's something we think about a lot as a firm and something we strongly support. This idea of we can build a future of greater human flourishing with these tools. The first thing I'd say is this may be the simplest of the few ideas, I have about this off the top of my head, is building products that enable more expression.

I think that I see this when I look at a much younger sibling or my sisters-in-law who are still in high school and are finding it that much more possible to create music, or create paintings.

And just explore ideas and share them with the world. And I think that's an amazing thing that we should build products that enable.

So that's the first piece. The second piece is I think we should keep automating the rote. There's no question in my mind that that's going to create dislocations in the economy. Because the reality is that a lot of people do work that is rote. But the story of technology has largely been freeing people up from that labor and enabling them to do higher-order things.

And I think we should do that. Let's automate the work that people obviously don't want to do. That's so much of the work that even I see myself and my colleagues do on a daily basis. Let's enable the higher order things. And actually, I think that's really a little bit to what Dr. Taubner said about financial stability as well. I think that is a path to us using these tools to create more of our productive output as a society from machines that can give us greater financial stability.

Now, obviously, there's a question about redistribution there and the role that plays in supporting a broader population. People talk about UBI, changes to taxation, all these kinds of things. I think that's closely related to issues of automating the rope.

And then the point number three, which I alluded to at the beginning of my comments is helping people find their best and highest use of their energies. That is the thing I am most excited about in all of my work, that I really think the systems we've built, actually with novel applications, can enable us to do that.

Find people that work that really keeps them inspired and gives them meaning.

Because no matter how materially wealthy we seem to become, we still seem to want to work. We don't have those 15-hour days that professor spoke to earlier. And so we clearly want to work as humans, by and large, in some capacity and apply our energies. And I think we should really put our minds to enabling folks to find the place they can really be inspired. That to me is a huge opportunity with AI.

SPEAKER 1: Sponsor Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.