Ethical AI: Ensuring Technology Serves Human Flourishing, Not Just Efficiency

Biddie Clive, Globethics Communications Intern and Colgate University student, May 2026

A Lesson from a 1950s Supercomputer

Written more than seventy years ago, Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC imagined a tension that is remarkably prescient. The story follows an engineer who consults a supercomputer originally built for military strategy to help him win the heart of a colleague. But what begins as a clever use of technology soon becomes a threat to human agency. Vonnegut warned then, and reminds us now, of the caution we should take in the ways we build, use, and govern technology.

What Should AI Be For?

As artificial intelligence evolves and becomes more present in our daily lives, we must ask: what is AI actually for?

Too often, the answer centres on efficiency—faster processes, smarter systems, and greater productivity; but while these outcomes matter, they should not be our principal focus.

The true goal of AI should be supplementary—not simply to do more, but to help us live better: with greater purpose and stronger character, pushing our condition beyond surviving to thriving.

Function or Flourish?

The Global Flourishing Study reinforces this concern through its emphasis on volitional well-being, which highlights the importance of character—formed through lived experience, altruism, and intentional action—as a cornerstone of a meaningful life.

Volition is what allows us to shape our lives with purpose rather than drift through them on autopilot. But in a world increasingly shaped by AI, this capacity is threatened.

When we replace human decision-making, problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking with artificial intelligence, we risk eroding our humanity.

AI for Human Flourishing, Not Replacement

The Global Flourishing Study reminds us that our technological innovation and governance should advance human well-being, not undermine it.

Ethical AI — in its design, governance, and everyday use — means building and deploying systems that strengthen human agency, not substitute for it:

AI should enable us to make better decisions, not decide them for us.
It should expand our creativity, not replace it.
It should deepen human connection, not erode it.

This relationship requires a fundamental shift in thinking: from efficiency to meaning, from automation to intention, from function to flourishing.

It also requires accountability from those building, governing, and using these systems. Technologists, policymakers, and organisations are not just engineers or administrators — they are architects shaping the future of human experience. That responsibility demands that AI be designed, regulated, and applied as an ethical pathway to flourishing: a human-centric technology that prioritises not only volition, but all dimensions of human well-being.

Human-Centric AI

Vonnegut ends his story with the image of a machine that, unable to comprehend the complexity of human love, self-implodes. But EPICAC is not the only one that loses: the engineer substitutes his feelings with robotic words and his fiancée is living a lie.

Thus, the question becomes not if AI can assist us, but if, in relying on it, we begin to lose the very capacities that define our humanity and enable us to flourish.

As we design, deploy, and govern technology moving forward, we must place humanity at the centre—considering all the ways it might be threatened, benefited, supported, and challenged.

The goal of AI should not be to make humans obsolete; instead, it should be to make their lives more fully human. This means preserving and strengthening our capacity for volition—for conscious, value-driven action. It means designing systems that support flourishing, not just functioning.