In partnership with

Aloha 👋 

Quick announcement before we dive into today's big question: should we love or fear AI?

The AI Maturity Index site recently relaunched. How do you like it?

Don’t hesitate to hit reply with feedback - brutal honesty welcome. 👊 

Now let's destroy the myth that AI will wreck humanity.

Enjoy the read!

The #1 AI Meeting Assistant

Still taking manual meeting notes in 2025? Let AI handle the tedious work so you can focus on the important stuff.

Fellow is the AI meeting assistant that:

✔️ Auto-joins your Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls to take notes for you.
✔️ Tracks action items and decisions so nothing falls through the cracks.
✔️ Answers questions about meetings and searches through your transcripts, like ChatGPT.

Try Fellow today and get unlimited AI meeting notes for 30 days.

Get Started Free

5 Reasons AI Benefits Humanity and How to Keep It Positive

The narrative around AI has grown increasingly dark. Headlines warn of mass unemployment, the end of human creativity, and even existential risk. David Shapiro's "Great Dislocation" thesis exemplifies this perspective - painting AI as an unstoppable force that will hollow out the middle class and trigger economic collapse.

This pessimism misses something crucial. Throughout history, transformative technologies have ultimately created more prosperity than they destroyed. The difference today isn't that AI will break this pattern, but that we're entering the disruption with our eyes open. We have the opportunity to shape AI's development before its most significant impacts materialize.

Here's why AI's potential to benefit humanity outweighs its risks, and concrete steps to ensure those benefits are widely shared.

1. Unprecedented Productivity Creates Material Abundance

Modern economies still struggle with fundamental scarcity problems. We lack enough affordable housing, sustainable energy, and accessible healthcare. The limiting factor has always been productivity - the amount we can produce with limited resources and human attention.

AI directly addresses this constraint. Machine learning systems already optimize supply chains, reducing waste by up to 30% in early adopters. General Mills has implemented real-time analytics and generative AI algorithms that achieved more than 30% waste reduction in their manufacturing processes.

The economic implications are profound. McKinsey's analysis suggests AI could add $13 trillion to global economic output by 2030. That's not just abstract GDP growth - it translates to more homes built, more renewable energy deployed, and more healthcare delivered at lower costs.

But productivity gains don't automatically benefit everyone. The industrial revolution created enormous wealth while initially impoverishing millions of workers. We must learn from this history.

How to keep it positive:

• First, implement progressive taxation on AI-generated profits. The companies capturing the most value from AI should contribute proportionally to society.

• Second, consider establish universal basic services or income to ensure everyone benefits from increased productivity. Finland's UBI experiments showed promising results for wellbeing without reducing workforce participation.

• Third, invest in public AI infrastructure that prioritizes common goods. The benefits of medical AI, for instance, should be available to all healthcare providers, not just the wealthiest.

2. Liberation from Routine Work

For most of history, human potential has been constrained by necessity. We spend the majority of our working hours on routine tasks that demand our attention but not our uniquely human capabilities.

AI increasingly handles these routine cognitive and physical tasks. This isn't just about efficiency – it fundamentally changes what work means. When machines manage data processing, scheduling, reporting, and similar tasks, humans can focus on creativity, complex judgment, and meaningful connection.

The four-day workweek becomes practical rather than aspirational. 91% of Exos employees reported spending their time more effectively at work, compared with 64% before the pilot. Work can evolve from necessity to purpose. This shift doesn't happen automatically, but it's achievable with intentional policies.

How to keep it positive:

• Implement shorter work weeks and job-sharing programs as productivity increases.

• Expand social support for care work, community service, and creative pursuits. The most valuable human activities often create insufficient market value.

• Develop new economic metrics beyond GDP that value contribution in all forms. New Zealand's wellbeing budget offers one promising model.

3. Enhanced Problem-Solving for Existential Challenges

Climate change, pandemic prevention, and resource depletion share a common trait: they involve complex systems that exceed human cognitive capacity. These challenges require analyzing vast datasets, modeling non-linear interactions, and optimizing across countless variables - precisely what AI excels at.

The evidence is already compelling. Google DeepMind's AI recently discovered 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power technologies like batteries and solar panels. This represents an extraordinary acceleration compared to traditional research methods. AI climate models now provide unprecedented precision in predicting local impacts and testing mitigation strategies.

We're moving from general-purpose AI to specialized systems built specifically to tackle these existential threats. This represents a fundamental shift in our problem-solving capacity.

How to keep it positive:

• Establish international AI research collectives focused exclusively on global challenges, similar to CERN but for AI applications in climate science, pandemic prevention, and sustainable development.

• Create open-access AI research platforms that democratize these tools for scientists worldwide. The current concentration of AI capabilities in a few corporate labs limits its application to the most pressing problems.

• Allocate substantial public funding specifically for deploying AI solutions in sustainability and public health. The market alone won't direct AI toward our most urgent collective needs.

4. Personalized Education and Healthcare at Scale

Education and healthcare suffer from the same fundamental constraint: human attention doesn't scale. A teacher can effectively engage only so many students. A doctor can properly treat only so many patients.

AI fundamentally changes this equation. We can now provide personalized education that adapts to individual learning styles and progress. In healthcare, AI is revolutionizing early-stage product design by enabling faster ideation, prototyping, and scenario testing... slashing pharmaceutical development timelines by up to three years.

These capabilities will dramatically expand access to quality education and healthcare, particularly for underserved populations.

How to keep it positive:

• Develop AI education and healthcare systems as public infrastructure, not just private services. Countries like Estonia already treat digital services as public utilities.

• Maintain meaningful human oversight and interaction. The goal should be AI-augmented teachers and doctors, not their replacement.

• Design systems that enhance human professionals rather than threatening them. The best implementations of medical AI make doctors more effective rather than obsolete.

5. Augmented Human Intelligence and Collaboration

The most powerful AI applications won't replace human intelligence but amplify it. The emerging paradigm isn't AI instead of humans, but AI working with humans in ways that enhance our natural capabilities.

AI systems serve as intellectual partners, helping us explore ideas, overcome cognitive biases, and process information beyond human scale. Studies consistently show that human-AI teams outperform either humans or AI working alone in complex problem-solving and decision-making tasks.

This augmentation makes us more thoughtful, creative, and effective across domains from scientific research to creative writing to strategic planning.

How to keep it positive:

• Design AI systems explicitly as collaborative partners. The interface and interaction model should facilitate partnership.

• Focus education on developing complementary human skills that AI lacks – creativity, ethical reasoning, emotional intelligence, and interdisciplinary thinking.

• Ensure AI tools remain accessible to everyone, not just technical specialists or wealthy organizations. Human augmentation should reduce inequality, not increase it.

Moving Forward Together

These benefits aren't guaranteed. They require intentional choices in how we develop, regulate, and deploy AI. The key isn't slowing innovation but steering it with clear principles and inclusive governance.

We need frameworks that balance innovation with accountability, technical progress with social values. This means bringing diverse perspectives into AI governance – not just technical experts but ethicists, social scientists, and representatives from communities historically marginalized by technology.

The stakes couldn't be higher. With thoughtful stewardship, AI can become the most powerful force for human advancement in our history – expanding opportunity, solving our most pressing problems, and ultimately making us more deeply human.

The future belongs to societies that harness AI's benefits while mitigating its risks. By making the right choices now, we can ensure that future includes all of us.

Until the next one,

Iwo