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Metrics with a Soul: Flourishing Indicators for Human-Centric AI [🌷Human Tech Week Flourishing Track]
​When we build technology today, what are we actually optimizing for? Financial returns? GDP growth? Efficiency at scale?
​Most AI evaluation frameworks today are designed to mitigate risk — guardrails, red lines, harm reduction. This is essential work, but it’s not enough.
​We’ve spent enormous energy defining what not to build.
Far less has gone into the more generative question:
​What does it look like when AI actively expands life-affirming, existentially hopeful futures?
​Answering that requires a different kind of metric.
​Not just evaluative metrics that optimize against failure, but formative, generative indicators — ones that track what’s emerging - Metrics with a Soul.
​What conditions for flourishing are being created
​What human and societal capacities are being strengthened
​What futures are becoming more reachable
​Not just “what are we preventing?”
But “what are we making possible?”
​About the Session
​This breakfast brings together practitioners working at exactly this frontier.
​Hosted by the CEO of Deeply Human and the co-chair of IEEE Global AIS Flourishing Initiative and the Executive Director of the Flourishing Systems Foundation — two organizations working to bridge theory and practice — this session will explore the development of Flourishing Indicators & Metrics, wellbeing-grounded AI standards, and the measurement infrastructure needed to make “human-centered AI” real.
​This is a working session for researchers, technologists, policymakers, designers, and funders who are ready to help build the next generation of metrics and standards — ones that orient innovation toward life, not just away from harm.
​Come with honest questions.
Leave with new collaborators.
​About the Hosts
​🌷 Iliana Grosse-Buening — Co-Founder & CEO of Deeply Human, a strategic firm embedding humanity-centered principles into AI and digital wellbeing. A leading voice in AI ethics, she advocates shifting the field from fear-based narratives toward agency, responsibility, and flourishing. She also co-chairs the IEEE Global AIS Flourishing Initiative, building on IEEE 7010 to advance global standards for flourishing-centered AI.
​🌷 Mingzhu He — Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Flourishing Systems Foundation, an innovation institute designing Systemic Flourishing Indicators, Return on Flourishing frameworks, and real-world infrastructure experiments situated in community-run spaces / living laboratories to make human and planetary flourishing measurable, fundable, and real.