CONCEPT
Salutogenesis
Antonovsky's reframing of health science: instead of asking what makes people sick?, ask what keeps people healthy? — the orientation that reorients the entire AI discourse from harm-prevention to flourishing-promotion.
Salutogenesis is the study of the origins of health, in deliberate contrast to pathogenesis, the study of the origins of disease. Antonovsky developed the concept in the 1970s after observing that some Holocaust survivors maintained remarkable psychological and physical health despite extreme trauma. Rather than ask why others broke down, he asked what protected those who endured. The salutogenic orientation does not deny stressors; it accepts them as ubiquitous and instead investigates the resources, dispositions, and structures that enable individuals and communities to navigate stress without losing their equilibrium. Applied to the AI transition, salutogenesis displaces the dominant pathogenic question — what harms will AI produce? — with a more generative one: what enables some workers and organizations to thrive in AI-saturated environments despite the genuine stressors those environments produce?
In The You On AI Field Guide
The pathogenic frame has dominated medicine for over a century, and it has dominated the AI discourse since ChatGPT crossed fifty million users. Both the triumphalists and the