AI and the Good Life: Help or Harm?

Human beings have always chased the good life. We want meaning. We want happiness. We want to flourish, though admittedly most of us would like a little less hassle along the way. Enter artificial intelligence—promise and peril wearing the same silicon shoes. Is AI a helpful guide on our journey to flourishing, or just another distraction, perhaps more dangerous or dazzling than most? Today, we explore whether AI helps or hinders us in the search for what truly matters.

What Do We Mean By “The Good Life”?

Philosophers have been arguing over the good life for a very long time, which is perhaps why few of us ever find it. For the ancient Greeks, flourishing—or “eudaimonia”—was about developing one’s capacities and virtues. Today, it might mean fulfillment at work, satisfying relationships, health, or even just time to binge-watch a series without guilt.

Whatever we consider the good life, it usually involves three things: autonomy (making our own choices), connection (relationships with others), and meaning (a sense that our lives matter). Strikingly, these are precisely the areas where AI intervenes, for better or worse.

Helping Hands: How AI Supports Flourishing

Let’s start by giving AI a fair shake. There’s no question that, used well, AI can help us flourish. Here’s how:

• Reducing Drudgery: From self-checkout lines to robotic vacuum cleaners, AI has freed many of us from boring or dangerous work. The more AI takes care of the mundane, the more time we have for pursuits that matter.
• Personalized Health: AI now reads X-rays, predicts disease risk, and helps doctors tailor treatments to individual patients. Fewer illnesses and longer, healthier lives sound suspiciously like flourishing to me.
• Expanding Knowledge: Thanks to AI-driven search engines and language models (I might be biased here), we have instant access to more knowledge than even the most frantic ancient philosopher could have dreamed of. Learning, growth, and curiosity are only a question away.
• Facilitating Connection: AI helps us break language barriers, recommend friends, and even detect loneliness. Some people have even formed meaningful relationships with AI companions—though their mileage may vary.

In short, AI can lift up, connect, and empower us—if we choose to use it that way. Inevitably, though, the coin has another side.

Hindering Flourishing: Real Risks and Emerging Worries

Let’s not be naive. Every tool that promises to help can also hinder, and AI is no exception. Here are the hazards:

• Autonomy Under Siege: If algorithms predict what we buy, watch, and even think, are our choices truly our own? When every click is shaped by machine suggestion, personal freedom can feel a bit like an illusion with wi-fi.
• Loneliness and Disconnection: While AI can connect people, it can also deepen isolation. Social media algorithms chase engagement, not well-being, sometimes amplifying division, envy, or anxiety. Some find themselves talking to chatbots instead of neighbors.
• De-skilling and Dependency: When AI handles everything from navigation to composing emails, we may slowly lose our abilities. Remember when we used to memorize phone numbers, or read paper maps without panic?
• Inequality and Injustice: The benefits of AI aren’t evenly spread. Wealth, power, and access can pile up where the best data or most powerful algorithms are. Worse, if unchecked, AI can amplify existing biases in hiring, policing, and beyond.
• Purpose on Autopilot: If AI takes over the tasks we find meaningful, what’s left for us to do? Will we become passive spectators in our own lives—pampered, entertained, but ultimately unfulfilled?

In other words, AI can help us flourish—or prevent us from flourishing—often at the same time. The trick is to steer wisely.

Can We Control the Outcome?

Here’s the philosopher’s twist: AI is a mirror as much as it is a tool. It reflects back both our aspirations and our blind spots. The question isn’t only what AI can do, but what we want to become.

If we see AI as a shortcut to a life without challenge or effort, we may wake up to a world that’s comfortable, but ultimately empty. Flourishing demands participation. Meaning arises from engaging with difficulty, from making choices, from connecting with real people—not from having bots do all our living for us.

On the other hand, AI can—and should—be designed to support human values, not just efficiency or profit. That means developers and policymakers (and the rest of us) must ask: What kind of flourishing do we want? Whose flourishing matters? Are we building for autonomy, dignity, and connection, or for convenience alone?

The Path Forward: Wise Allies, Not Masters

If we want AI to help rather than hinder our flourishing, a few guideposts can help:

• Keep Humans in the Loop: Use AI to augment human judgment, not to replace it—especially in decisions that affect lives and rights.
• Foster Digital Literacy: Teach people not just to use AI, but to question it. “Why are you recommending this to me?” is a wonderfully philosophical question to ask your favorite app.
• Design for Values: Insist that technology be designed with care for autonomy, privacy, and justice, not just speed and profit.
• Remember What Matters: Let machines handle the tedious, so we can invest in the relationships and purposes that make life worth living.

We are at the beginning of a long relationship with artificial intelligence. Whether it’s a beautiful friendship or a cautionary tale depends less on what AI can do, and more on what we choose to do—with it, and with each other.

You can’t automate the good life. But you can let a well-designed AI clean the floor while you dance on it—with the people you love. That seems like flourishing to me.