#technologyandsociety — Public Fediverse posts

How Do We Know Whether AI Is Actually Helping People?

What several AI models said when we asked them the same question

Artificial intelligence is getting more capable very quickly. It can write, analyze data, create images, translate languages, help with research, and solve problems that once required trained specialists.

But greater capability does not automatically mean a better life for people.

That was the starting point for a small cross-model experiment. We asked several AI systems the same basic question:

How would you determine whether increasingly capable AI is actually benefiting human life?

We also invited each model to question the premise, redefine the problem, or suggest something better than a single index. The models were instructed to answer independently without browsing the web or using outside tools.

The responses differed in style and emphasis. Some focused on measurable outcomes. Others focused on human dignity, democratic participation, meaningful work, or the danger of becoming dependent on systems we do not control.

Yet a surprisingly clear agreement emerged.

Capability is not the same as benefit

Technical progress is easy to measure. We can count how many problems an AI solves, how quickly it works, or how well it performs on tests.

Human flourishing is harder to measure. It includes health, safety, freedom, relationships, purpose, knowledge, creativity, and the ability to shape one’s own life.

An AI system may become better at achieving a goal while the goal itself harms people. A highly effective system might increase surveillance, spread convincing scams, replace human judgment, concentrate power, or keep users engaged at the expense of their attention and well-being.

So the important question is not simply, “What can AI do?”

It is:

What becomes possible for people because of AI—and what becomes more difficult, fragile, or impossible?

Look at human outcomes, not just machine performance

Across the responses, the models repeatedly shifted attention away from the machine and toward human life.

They suggested asking whether people are:

• healthier and safer;
• more financially secure;
• better able to learn and create;
• more connected to other people;
• more informed without being manipulated;
• able to understand and challenge important decisions;
• free to refuse the technology or choose another path.

This also requires examining harms, not merely counting success stories. Time saved by one group may come with unemployment, stress, lost privacy, or reduced opportunity for another.

A true evaluation must ask who receives the benefits, who carries the risks, and who has the power to decide.

Agency belongs at the center

One of the strongest shared themes was human agency: our ability to understand, choose, refuse, act, and take responsibility.

Convenience alone is not agency. A system can make life easier while quietly reducing a person’s choices or replacing their judgment.

Helpful AI should strengthen people’s ability to participate in their own lives. It should make important decisions more understandable, provide meaningful options, and allow people to correct mistakes or appeal harmful outcomes.

People need more than access to AI. They need power in relation to it.

Assistance should not erase human competence

Several responses warned that a tool can help us today while making us less capable tomorrow.

If people lose the knowledge needed to check an AI system, operate without it, or recover when it fails, short-term convenience may create long-term fragility.

This suggests a simple test:

If the AI disappeared tomorrow, what knowledge, skill, judgment, and institutional capacity would remain?

The best systems may act more like scaffolding than substitutes. Scaffolding helps people reach farther while they continue developing their own abilities. Substitution can slowly remove the very competence that makes human oversight possible.

Benefit is not one number

Another broad agreement was that a single “AI Benefit Score” would hide too much.

An average can make widespread gains look impressive while concealing serious harm to a smaller or less powerful group. One number can also allow gains in productivity to cancel out losses of privacy, dignity, freedom, or democratic control.

A better approach would combine several forms of evaluation:

1. Outcomes: Are people healthier, safer, more secure, more connected, and materially better off?
2. Agency: Are people more able to choose, understand, refuse, create, and govern their lives?
3. Resilience: Are human skills, social institutions, alternatives, and the ability to recover being preserved?

Each of these should be examined across four additional questions:

• Distribution: Who benefits, and who is harmed?
• Power: Who controls the system and can be held accountable?
• Time: What happens months, years, or generations later?
• Causation: Did AI actually cause the change, or did it merely appear alongside it?

Some harms may also require firm boundaries. Violations of basic rights, unaccountable concentrations of power, irreversible dependency, and catastrophic risks should not automatically be traded away for higher productivity.

We may need to preserve meaningful difficulty

One especially challenging idea was that a good life is not the same as a frictionless life.

Learning, creativity, courage, responsibility, trust, and mastery often grow through effort. If AI removes every difficult step, it may produce more output while weakening the human development that once occurred during the process.

The goal should not be to preserve suffering for its own sake. It should be to distinguish pointless burdens from meaningful challenges.

Beneficial AI should reduce needless hardship while leaving people room to practice, struggle, discover, make mistakes, and grow. Human beings may need not only a right to privacy and refusal, but also a right to be wrong.

The deeper question is democratic

There is no single definition of a good life that a company, government, researcher, or AI model should impose on everyone.

The people affected by an AI system should help decide what benefits and harms matter in their communities. They should be able to question the system, challenge its decisions, and participate in setting its boundaries.

That means the process used to define “benefit” may be as important as the final measurements.

What this first experiment suggests

The most striking result was not that one model found the perfect answer. It was that multiple systems, responding independently, converged on a common warning:

More capable AI is not necessarily more beneficial AI.

To know whether AI is helping, we must look beyond benchmarks, adoption, and economic growth. We must look at people—their health, freedom, competence, relationships, opportunities, and ability to shape the future.

The next stage of this project will ask the same models to respond after receiving a fuller human-flourishing framework. That will allow us to compare what the models recognized on their own with what changes after they are deliberately oriented toward compassion, agency, resilience, and stewardship.

The question is not whether AI will become more powerful. It almost certainly will.

The question is what conditions we cultivate around that power—and what possibilities those conditions make available tomorrow.

This article is a public-facing summary of Round 01 of the CompassionWare AI Human Benefit Index benchmark project. Read the comparative synthesis report.

On what happens when our surroundings begin to understand us ☕️

I’ve written about special education, Kierkegaard, AI, and information governance.

For many years, I tried to understand how other people perceived the world in order to adapt their surroundings to them.

But what happens when technical systems begin to understand us — and can adapt the environment in order to influence us?

https://piewpiew.se/blog/2026/08/08/nar-omgivningen-borjar-forsta-oss/

#AI #artificialintelligence #technologyandsociety #informationgovernance #ethics

Meine Aktivität zum #digitalindependenceday heute: YouTube-App durch #NewPipe ersetzt. Keine Algorithmen, kein Tracking, keine automatischen Shorts. Denn auch das gehört zur #DigitaleSouveränität : selbstbestimmt Inhalte nutzen (ohne in den Dopamin Strudel endloser Vorschlagslisten zu geraten)

Installation (https://di.day/de/wechselrezepte/video):

1. #Fdroid (f-droid.org) installieren,
2. NewPipe herunterladen,
3. YouTube-App deaktivieren (optional).

#DIDit #DUTgemacht #OpenSource #TechnologyAndSociety

https://dominusmarkham.com/the-distance-between-convenience-and-consequence/

#thequietsignal
#TechnologyAndSociety
#supplychain
#CriticalThinking
#modernlife
#technology
#globalization
#ethicalconsumption
#writing

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 2: 🤖 #Self-Models, #neuromorphic #AI & the Future of Our #CultureofConsciousness 🧠

What is the “self”—and could a #machine one day develop its own #consciousness?

In the second part of the discussion, the #SelfModelTheory of #Subjectivity takes center stage.

🎥 https://youtu.be/Ibf2mrZ3uzM

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfMind #Neuroethics #KIEthics #TechnologyAndSociety #FutureOfAI #Philosophy

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 2: 🤖 #Self-Models, #neuromorphic #AI & the Future of Our #CultureofConsciousness 🧠

What is the “self”—and could a #machine one day develop its own #consciousness?

In the second part of the discussion, the #SelfModelTheory of #Subjectivity takes center stage.

🎥 https://youtu.be/Ibf2mrZ3uzM

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfMind #Neuroethics #KIEthics #TechnologyAndSociety #FutureOfAI #Philosophy

Tracing the origin of Argentine Malbec wines by sensometrics

Sensory attributes discriminate zones geographic denominations over vintages From a wine production …
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Argentinewine #agriculture #Argentina #ArgentinianWine #Chemistry/FoodScience #FoodMicrobiology #foodscience #general #nutrition #science #technologyandsociety #Wine #WinesfromArgentina #WinesofArgentina
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2574634/tracing-the-origin-of-argentine-malbec-wines-by-sensometrics/

🧠🔍 Episode 3: #Mind reading with #brain scanners – Season 1 “Kaleidoscope of Science”

How close are we really to reading thoughts from the brain?

👉 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/02/03/gedankenlesen/

📺 https://youtu.be/3p96qQQkUE8

#KaleidoscopeOfScience #Zoomposium #Neuroscience #MachineLearning #Externalism #Language #Community #CognitiveScience #PhilosophyOfMind #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Ethics #MindReading #ScienceCommunication #Consciousness #Neurotechnology #TechnologyAndSociety

🧠🔍 Episode 3: #Mind reading with #brain scanners – Season 1 “Kaleidoscope of Science”

How close are we really to reading thoughts from the brain?

👉 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/02/03/gedankenlesen/

📺 https://youtu.be/3p96qQQkUE8

#KaleidoscopeOfScience #Zoomposium #Neuroscience #MachineLearning #Externalism #Language #Community #CognitiveScience #PhilosophyOfMind #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Ethics #MindReading #ScienceCommunication #Consciousness #Neurotechnology #TechnologyAndSociety

CES (Consumer Technology Association) 2026 isn't just about gadgets.
It's about where technology meets humanity.
IEEE - Advancing Technology For Humanity .

I had the honor of speaking with Mary Ellen Randall, President and CEO of IEEE, from Las Vegas during CES this week.

#IEEE — the world's largest technical professional society — has been around for over 140 years. 500,000 members. 190 countries. And a mission that cuts through the noise: advancing #technology for the benefit of #humanity.
Not for hype. Not for quarterly earnings. For humanity.

We talked about Jensen Huang receiving the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor. Yes, #NVIDIA built the chips powering the AI revolution, but the recognition goes deeper — it's about the entire ecosystem enabling breakthroughs in #healthcare, autonomous systems, drug discovery, and beyond.

Mary Ellen shared something that stuck with me. She sees this moment as a new Renaissance. Like Florence in the 1400s — painters collaborating with sculptors, scientists exchanging ideas across disciplines — we're at an inflection point where everything is intersecting.

(I wonder why a reference to the Rinascimento resonated with me 😅)

The difference? We have the tools to do it globally, instantly.
But speed without ethics is reckless. IEEE is developing standards for #AIbias prevention, certification programs for responsible development, even protections for young people online. The slow, unglamorous work that lets innovation happen safely.

"Engineering with purpose" — that's the phrase she kept returning to.
In a world obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, it's refreshing to talk with people committed to building things that last. And building them right.

You can watch the interview https://youtu.be/CqSSleJm1wk or listen to the podcast on Redefining Society and Technology podcast — 

Video Podcast: https://youtu.be/CqSSleJm1wk
Audio Podcast: https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com
Event Coverages: https://www.itspmagazine.com

#CES2026 #IEEE #JensenHuang #NVIDIA #TechnologyAndSociety #AI #Engineering #Innovation #RedefiningHumanity #cybersecurity

Sean Martin, CISSP Studio C60

A significant EU reform landed recently, reshaping how we safeguard elections, media, civil society, and the information space.

We’ve published an in-depth analysis that connects the dots across the Democracy Shield, the Civil Society Strategy, and the deeper cultural shifts beneath them.
https://associationredefine.substack.com/p/from-crisis-to-capacity-the-eus-most?r=6l8ed8

#Democracy #eu #disinformation #civicEngagement #humanrights #civilsociety #democraticresilience #informationintegrity #technologyandsociety #publicpolicy #futureofDemocracy

NEW EPISODE on Redefining Society and Technology Podcast... so good!
Kate O'Neill is a Tech Humanist ranked in Thinkers50, a global keynote speaker, and executive advisor on #AI #ethics and future-ready tech decision-making. Her new book "What Matters Next" (Wiley) gives #leaders a framework for making human-centered decisions in a world where #technology moves faster than our ability to think through the implications.
I ABSOLUTELY loved this conversation! We went deep on something most leadership books skip over: what happens to meaning when we hand creative work over to #algorithms.
Kate's insight stopped me cold: when AI generates the most statistically probable outcome, information theory tells us it's actually creating the least meaningful one.
Every time we hit "generate" and just accept what comes back, we're choosing efficiency over significance. We're flattening human expression down to whatever's most likely, not what actually matters.
"There is nothing more human than meaning-making," she said. "From semantic meaning all the way out to the philosophical, cosmic worldview - what matters and why we're here."
Here's the paradox I've been living: AI sometimes takes MORE time, not less.
Kate laughed when I told her this because she knows the phenomenon from her #tech background - "yak shaving," where you spend ten times longer automating something than just doing it. But that's not really about time management. It's about understanding the relationship between our thoughts and the tools we use to express them.
Her message in "What Matters Next" isn't anti-#AI. It's about staying in the loop. Use these tools for ugly drafts, let them expedite workflow, but keep inserting yourself back into the process. Keep meaning and purpose alive in what you create.
Otherwise, as Kate puts it, we're just making "garbage that none of us want to exist in the world with."
In our Hybrid Analog Digital Society, the question isn't whether to use AI. It's how to use it in ways that amplify human decision-making and creativity rather than replace them.
Watch/listen to my full conversation with Kate O'Neill on the Redefining Society and Technology Podcast.
#Leadership #AIEthics #TechnologyAndSociety #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfWork #TechHumanist #AIStrategy #Innovation
Sean Martin, CISSP Studio C60 / ITSPmagazineRetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

Watch the Video 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD4o33V5J9U
Listen to the Podcast 👉 https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com/episodes/author-kate-oneills-book-what-matters-next-ai-meaning-and-why-we-cant-delegate-creativity-redefining-society-and-technology-with-marco-ciappelli-M_o7v_D4

New episode alert! 🚗⚡

Why Electric Vehicles Need an Apollo Program: The Renewable Energy Infrastructure Reality We're Ignoring

I had a conversation with Swedish business consultant Mats Larsson (sorry for the late publication, Mats!!!) that completely shattered my assumptions about our electric vehicle transition.

We've been treating the #EV shift like upgrading our smartphones — expecting seamless transformation. But here's the reality: to electrify ALL US transportation, we need to double power generation. That's 360 nuclear reactors worth of electricity.

"First of all, we need to admit that we do not know exactly how to build the future. And then we need to start building it." — Mats Larsson

This isn't about building better cars. It's about redesigning civilization's transportation nervous system while pretending it's just another product launch.

Are we ready for Apollo program-scale thinking?

👇 Read the full article in my newsletter. There you can watch or listen the to the complete conversation.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-podcast-episode-why-electric-vehicles-need-apollo-marco-ciappelli-pd5xc/?trackingId=LWn%2BUK%2F78zChuUP9VWTReA%3D%3D

#ElectricVehicles #Infrastructure #TechnologyAndSociety #Innovation #tech #Podcast #cars #transportation #future ITSPmagazine Sean Martin, CISSP

Sebastian Pfotenhauer discusses the new #ClusterofExcellence #TransforM, which explores how #technology and #society co-shape each other. The cluster aims to study socio-technical shocks in real time and rethink #innovation processes: http://go.tum.de/210816

#ResponsibleInnovation #TechnologyAndSociety #TransformativeTechnologies

📷M. Jooss

🎙️ Here is what in my news today! :)

A new transmission from Musing On Society and Technology

🌀 From Cassette Tapes and Phrasebooks to AI Real-Time Translations

There’s something beautifully awkward about trying to understand someone in a language that’s not your own.

I’ve been dreaming of real-time translation since I was a kid — not flying cars, not robot butlers (though I’d take one to fold laundry). Just the idea of truly understanding someone, in their language.

Now, with AI-powered translations in #Google Meet, we’re there.

It’s seamless. Flawless. Magical.

And then… it sucks.

Like, existentially, beautifully sucks.

Because while machines can now speak for us, we may be forgetting how to actually understand each other.

As a proud Gen X analog soul, I remember the rewinds, the mixtapes, the Maxell cassettes, the static. I felt language — in the waiting, the effort, the emotion.

Now? Everything’s fast. Clean. Automated. Translated. But at what cost?

This isn’t just about tech. It’s about humanity, connection, and the spaces in between. We don’t live in 0s and 1s — we live in the gray, the glitch, the hybrid.

🧭 Read (or listen to) the full story here — narrated by my #AI sidekick, TAPE3, who has a decent voice and way better pronunciation than me 😅:

👉 https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7079849705156870144/

Radio version? I meant podcast?

Here 🎧 https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com/episodes/from-cassette-tapes-and-phrasebooks-to-ai-real-time-translations-machines-can-now-speak-for-us-but-were-losing-the-art-of-understanding-each-other-a-musing-on-society-technology-newsletter-written-by-marco-ciappelli-read-by-tape3

✌️ Stay curious and mispronounce a few words, it is ok.

— Marco

#AI #Translation #TechnologyAndSociety #DigitalHumanity #Storytelling #GenX #AnalogVsDigital #CulturalConnection #Language #HybridSociety #tech #technology #education #learning

I've been pondering for many years how best to share a view of morality more coherent and scalable than that of our ancestors—with information technology amplifying (1) our understanding of our present but evolving values and (2) our methods for promoting those values into the future we create.

But how to share? The background knowledge is an unusual set that crosses the usual divides between science and humanities, technology and sociology, engineering and philosophy, …

Different people have different pieces of this background knowledge, but few have all the pieces to put it together.

I considered a book, a series of books, a series of essays, fictional stories conveying the key concepts, art, music, games, self-guided books with multiple paths, …

But very recently it became clear that an AI-mediated process is now practical and close to ideal! My own contribution to the project becomes focused on clearly communicating the web of concepts to the AI, and it will focus on effective interaction with users of disparate backgrounds.

Thought this worth sharing for others who may be faced with similar challenges.

Onward!

#AI #ethics #morality #sociology #politics #decisionMaking #technologyAndSociety

"Digital Vampires": I highly recommend this four-part podcast series by Paris Marx of Tech Won't Save Us, https://markstoneman.com/2024/11/20/digital-vampires-fourpart.html #BigTech #LLMs #SiliconValley #Politics #TechnologyAndSociety