Principles for Human Flourishing in the Age of AI

Hi friends!

This year I will be writing down some principles that are helping me live a more meaningful and impactful life. I started creating this list when I realized how easy it is in today’s modern world to get distracted from what’s most important, and how challenging it is without regular reflection to harness the lessons we have learned along the way. These principles are meant to help me think about what it means to flourish as a human being and what practices can help me to stay focused on living according to those principles every day.

George Eliot, writing about the young doctor Lydgate in her 19th century novel Middlemarch, describes the complex of intertwining forces that make it difficult to predict how a person will fare in flourishing over the course of a lifetime:  “He was at a starting-point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swims and makes his point or else is carried headlong.” Happenstance, as well as social, technological, and biological forces can bend us, often imperceptibly, away from our deepest sources of well-being, and frustrate our attempts at achieving all we might. Amidst the multitude of external circumstances that may help to swerve us away from living a meaningful life, our individual characters, habits, and behaviors are also, Eliot suggests, a “process and an unfolding,” with “virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding.”

If a human life is indeed a fine subject for betting, how can we increase the odds that we would place a bet on ourselves?

We can only change an area of our lives by first noticing that it exists, asking ourselves how we are doing, and then identifying opportunities to improve or change our mental models about what improvement looks like. Only conscious engagements with those areas through reflection and deliberate practice can optimize and recalibrate our behaviors. But how do we identify the behaviors and beliefs that would benefit from reflection, as well as the associated principles that are most likely to lead to improvement over time? And, how do we remember to reflect on and compare our present behaviors with these principles and practices.

This perennial issue is complicated by the astounding number of contexts we must navigate in the modern world.  To function effectively, many of our modes for engaging with our environment must out of necessity run on an intuitive level—a (more or less) carefully programmed form of autopilot.

Effective, continual learning in the modern world requires the capture and reuse of information that exceeds the brain's capacity to remember what has been learned and stored. A process is needed for prioritizing this information on a periodic basis to reassess its value for the actions we take in the present or in future, understanding that the original contexts in which information is collected or gathered will change over time. A system for managing effectively what has been learned can carry an astonishing power. Without one, we are left feeling perpetually off balance.

My generation has witnessed a series of information transformations over the past four decades. The rise of personal computing, the internet, mobile devices, and social media have ushered in what is now known as the attention economy, which has flooded our senses with novel, copious, and often addictive forms of content. In just the last few weeks, generative image and natural language processing technologies have become available to the general public. Enter the age of AI, which is poised to rapidly unleash a wave of automated content creation at a level that was previously unthinkable.

In this context, we have a lot we can learn from the practice of keeping commonplace books that emerged during the Renaissance as a popular information management tool for organizing and preserving personal knowledge amid the dramatic increase in the availability and number of printed books. To create a commonplace book, a person would copy passages from their reading into a notebook, typically under specific topical headings that helped one re-find information more quickly. Some teachers recommended rereading commonplace headings frequently to "excite and irritate our cold and languishing memories.”  Similarly, a list of principles is an act of memory-building, serving as a map for areas of engagement, with the best knowledge and tools acquired through a lifetime of learning.

These principles capture the most critical lessons I have learned from practicing to lead the best life I possibly can.

For the next 365 days, I will publish one principle per day along with the source material where I found the best representation of that principle.

I would greatly appreciate the support of my network in helping me follow through with this commitment to myself. If my posts are helpful to anyone else, that will serve as additional motivation to continue.