CONCEPT
Flourishing as Goal-Level Intervention
The replacement of productivity with human flourishing as the AI system's optimization target — a goal-level leverage point that reorganizes everything beneath it in the hierarchy.
The current goal of the AI system is productivity — not because anyone declared it, but because every signal the system sends points in the same direction: more, faster, broader. Metrics, rewards, competitive dynamics, cultural valorization — all converge on output. Edo Segal proposes an alternative: human flourishing as the optimization target. Under Meadows's framework, this is a goal-level intervention, and its power comes from the way it reorganizes everything beneath it. Rules change to reward the maintenance of human capacities. Information flows highlight quality of experience, not just quality of output. Feedback structures detect depletion, not just production. The goal determines which metrics count as progress and which count as pathology.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The goal shift sounds abstract until applied to concrete decisions. Under productivity as goal, an organization facing the choice between converting AI efficiency into headcount reduction or into expanded capability will choose reduction. The arithmetic is clean; the quarterly benefit is immediate. Under flourishing