ProSocial AI: What It Is and Why It Matters
Abstract
Artificial intelligence is being built fast and deployed faster, yet the dominant design logic of most AI systems remains extractive: optimised for engagement, data capture, and shareholder return rather than for human flourishing or ecological integrity. This essay introduces ProSocial AI as a substantive alternative — a framework for designing, deploying, and governing AI systems that are deliberately Tailored, Trained, Tested, and Targeted to bring out the best in and for people and planet. Drawing on the ProSocial AI Index, a 4T×4P matrix that evaluates AI systems across four criteria (Tailored, Trained, Tested, Targeted) and four intent dimensions (Purpose, People, Prosperity, Planet), the essay explains the theoretical rationale for reorienting AI development toward prosocial ends within planetary boundaries, and maps the conditions that make this reorientation urgent. The framework is grounded in a conception of Hybrid Intelligence — the dynamic coevolution of natural human intelligence and artificial intelligence — and governed by the principles of a Hybrid Return on Values (HROV), which counts political empowerment, human development outcomes and ecological integrity alongside financial returns. The essay argues that the Global South, including Latin America, holds particular strategic capacity to lead this transition. Countries that retain epistemic diversity, demographic vitality, and institutional latitude to choose differently are positioned to demonstrate that a Hybrid Future — pro-people, pro-planet, and pro-potential — is achievable. The essay advances the Fourth Path as an orienting philosophy: a deliberate, values-anchored alternative to both techno-utopianism and techno-pessimism, grounded in an expansion of collective human agency.
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