AI + Human Flourishing Part 1: Educational Capabilities

When I think about my little brother and sister, who are ten years old, and I imagine the world they’re about to occupy, I worry. How will they cope in a technology-saturated world, and do they have the resilience not just to adapt, but to thrive, in the face of widespread technological, political, and societal change?

I work in Higher Education at the intersection of learning design and learning technology, and my love for my siblings has led me to think about how we can create an education that prepares the next generation for a future dominated by technology and AI. 

The main question seems to be this: In a highly automated, technology-saturated, and AI-driven world, what is education actually for?

I’ll attempt to answer this question below.

In a highly automated, technology-saturated, and AI-driven world, education should be for…

Developing the person and not just knowledge of the subject

Unlike previous technological advances, LLMs (Large Language Models) process large amounts of information and then generate pattern-based outputs through natural language. This makes reproducing information less valuable because tools can do it faster and draw on far more data.

Education, therefore, shouldn’t aim to teach knowledge alone, and should instead aim to develop human capabilities focused on what students can do with that knowledge. 

For example, a historian does not simply memorise key dates; they also practice archiving, interpreting conflicting evidence, understanding context, and exercising judgment. 

Developing a practice and a way of contributing

Education should help students discover what they want to contribute to the world and how they can develop a practice to contribute through. Practices could include writing or podcasting, or any kind of creating that leads to a body of work, as well as asking deeper questions, analysing data, engaging in public debates, or mentoring others.

This is particularly important in response to AI because active contribution, rather than passive consumption, may provide a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Students would also retain an employability advantage because they can point to a tangible body of work, project, or public practice that demonstrates their skills beyond academic settings.

Providing experience

When questioning what sets a university education apart from LLMs and AI, one answer is that we facilitate human experiences. Higher Education provides structured experiences of human dialogue, disagreements, collaboration, risk-taking, failing and trying again, and encountering differences.

Higher Education is the difference between practising for an interview with an LLM and actually being in the interview itself. Technology might increasingly mediate experiences that once required direct human contact. If that’s the case, then human experiences could become education’s USP. 

Accessing and creating communities

As more of our interactions are mediated by technology, concerns over the impact on loneliness and isolation are growing. LLMs may exacerbate this issue, leading people to communicate with chatbots rather than with other humans. Education should therefore offer structured and supported participation in human-led intellectual and social communities. 

Students should also be taught how to create their own communities to reach, network with, and learn from others. 

Learning criticality (of systems, power, and consequences)

The world is increasingly complex with a multitude of systems, power dynamics, and consequences. Education should teach students to question the incentives of organisations, systems, and those with power. Who are they catering to? Who are they disadvantaging? What are the social, environmental, or economic consequences of what is happening? 

Criticality is the first step, but we must also teach students what to do with that critique. This means teaching agency. 

Teaching agency and the ability to act

Agency is not merely about spotting problems or being critical; it’s about actively deciding to do something to solve that problem or reshape society.

We can teach students to be critical of technology, for example, by critiquing the environmental implications of data centres, but agency takes this criticality further by asking: what can you do about this? Could you advocate, start a project, create an awareness campaign, change a policy, or create a better system?

This is an important capability, particularly in response to AI, because it moves students from being passive consumers of technology, media, or information, and towards being active contributors to it. 

Teaching judgment and discernment

AI is increasingly the first to generate an answer, a draft, a solution, or an analysis; we therefore need to teach students to judge accuracy, relevance, complexity, value, and consequence. Education should help students to practice discernment, enabling them to distinguish between what is true or false, good or bad, complex or simple. It should teach us how to reject a certain framing and how to justify that rejection appropriately. 

Connections to flourishing

What strikes me as I attempt to answer what education should be for in a technology-saturated world is that many of the capabilities outlined above connect to human flourishing. Modern conceptions of flourishing comprise the more nuanced components that make up a good life, such as happiness, meaning and purpose, belonging, character and virtue, and material stability.

Take my answer of agency and the ability to act. This is closely linked to modern conceptions of flourishing and wellbeing. Having agency and the ability to act could arguably contribute to one of the Harvard Human Flourishing Project’s (VanderWeele, 2017) flourishing domains: our sense of meaning and purpose. It also overlaps with the OECD’s wellbeing framework (Durand, 2015), which includes civic engagement as a factor contributing to positive wellbeing. By teaching agency, then, we’ll not only move students from passive consumers of technology to active contributors to society, but we’ll simultaneously contribute to their flourishing as human beings. 

This is just one interesting example where flourishing begins to overlap with educational capabilities for the future. I can see more. For example, accessing and creating communities also appears in both the Harvard Human Flourishing Project and OECD’s wellbeing framework in some form. 

My conclusion, then, is this: 

In a world where intelligent technologies are abundant, the capabilities required by future generations (like my little brother and sister) will change. Education must change with those needs by anticipating future technological shifts and preparing our students for them. From much of my reading and exploration so far, I believe that the capabilities above, paired with a focus on flourishing, wellbeing, human experience, and emotion, will become more important than ever. 

References:

Durand, M. (2015) The OECD Better Life Initiative: How's Life? And the Measurement of Well-being, Review of Income and Wealth, OECD [online] available at https://www.roiw.org/2015/n1/02%20-%2012156.pdf (accessed 05/09/2026)

VanderWeele, J. T. (2017) Human Flourishing Program, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science [online] available at https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/ (accessed 05/09/2026)