Human Flourishing Conference with Dr. Andrew Serazin & Dr. Brie Linkenhoker
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergay, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.

Listeners, next week is Thanksgiving, so the subject of our exploration in today's episode is perfectly timed, as Thanksgiving is, at its best, a celebration of human connection, cooperation, and flourishing.

Today we hear from two friends of the podcast, discussing another collective celebration and exploration of human flourishing, a meeting of minds, hearts, and souls across the planet. We start today's conversation with Templeton World Charity Foundation President Dr. Andrew Sarazin, who shares his plans for the upcoming first-ever Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing.

This worldwide conference on November 28th and 29th is free and open to the public and will include dynamic dialogues with leading scientists, policymakers, practitioners, influencers, and advocates working on the scientific frontiers of human flourishing.

This first annual virtual event will feature the latest scientific advances in understanding human flourishing across cultures and showcase innovative new tools and strategies to promote greater flourishing around the world. We hope sharing Dr. Sarazin's inspiration for the event will inspire you to join in. We'd love to have you there.

Let's start with why Templeton World Charity Foundation is hosting this global event. Here's Dr. Sarazin. Templeton World Charity Foundation thinks that the time is right to bring together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to examine what's possible for the future of human flourishing. Over the past decade, we've seen

a tremendous amount of research activity in positive psychology, in philosophy, and in technology, in cognition, in neuroscience. Taking this idea of what is the good life and how do we live it? These are questions

that go back millennia. But I think over the last decade specifically, we've seen just a burgeoning of all kinds of research within the academic community. And that's driven by a real sense of human need, that we need to find ways to move past survival as the end goal for our society. Take the word sustainability. Sustainability really is just about keeping what we have. It's about kind of minimizing the uses of our resources just to keep up.

That's not a good goal for society. Our goal for society should be more than that. It should be about growth and flourishing and resilience and adaptation to change and learning and possibility and creativity. And so we think this interdisciplinary group of scientists and policymakers, entrepreneurs and innovators can come together to really examine that basic paradigm shift towards flourishing.

So moving from a quaint scholarly niche that was only found in maybe some psychology departments or some philosophy departments or maybe some history departments within the academy and creating an ecosystem that is developing new knowledge and spreading the awareness of that knowledge as well as production of practical tools. So it's a really exciting moment.

Will Templeton World Charity Foundation, Dr. Sarazin, and the conference attendees be working from a singular, shared definition of human flourishing? This topic of defining human flourishing is really important. And so you can put a basket of metrics into a flourishing index, and many have.

over the years, and they typically sort out into a number of categories. Categories like meaning and purpose, categories like character and virtue, categories like close social relationships, happiness and life satisfaction, and physical and mental health measures. I think while we have a very good working definition of some of the major dimensions of flourishing, there are some clear gaps.

So, although we might measure meaning and purpose in life, flourishing isn't a static thing. It's dynamic. It unfolds over a lifespan. What may be flourishing and what matters for flourishing in adolescence may be different from middle age. And so we lack that kind of nuanced understanding of the life course.

Another knowledge gap that we have is we don't really understand how core aspects of human experience like suffering and adversity and problems and challenges can actually create the conditions for future growth. Sir John Templeton had a phrase that he loved to say which is that he thought about the earth as a school.

So the course of our life is a series of opportunities to learn and grow from. And inevitably, we have challenges. And so the models we have for flourishing don't necessarily incorporate that sense of adversity being core to the human experience and core as an opportunity to learn and grow from.

and we haven't really incorporated different cultural views. And so there may never be one grand unified theory of flourishing. I think that would be a mistake. I think it will always adapt and change to circumstances.

we have a good understanding of some of the major factors, but I think this experiment, this grand journey that we're on is going to sort of take that paradigm of a singular definition and create a kind of much more nuanced and rich description of flourishing which accommodates the range of human experience.

What kinds of questions does Dr. Sarazin hope will be explored at the Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing? I see this conference as the can't-miss opportunity for sharing the most fascinating and important discoveries in human flourishing.

And so we can expect a tremendous focus on new data that you need to know about. We can also expect an aspect of celebration so that we are celebrating that this community has come together and realized that as much

intellectual and financial horsepower that we've applied to many, many other subjects should be applied to the topic of flourishing. It is the most important topic of our time. There is not

A person on the planet who over the past three years hasn't considered these deep questions of existence. What is worth sacrificing for? What do I prioritize in my life and why do I do it? How can I secure the flourishing of my children and my loved ones? And what's worth fighting for in my life? And that's these sort of core questions of human existence that go way beyond survival that this conference seeks to orient itself around.

The conference has three different major components. There is a global virtual plenary series where we will showcase the best new discoveries, the best new papers, the most compelling speakers in the world on the topic. And that will be constructed for both measuring, this question of measuring flourishing, as well as

applying those lessons in the real world. Some of those examples include things like forgiveness, which is, I think, core for humanity to grow and prosper just like listening is, where this is how we live practically in a real world that is imperfect. Part of the global plenary sessions will include celebration, and I think the arts are a great way for us to express joy and

an understanding of beauty, which are absolutely core to Flourishing. The perception of serenity and joy and beauty come through the creative medium that is core to the human experience. So we'll definitely showcase those kind of artistic expressions in the plenary sessions. You will also have a number of workshops which will be held in person in various locations around the world.

that are all happening simultaneously. So you can think about these sort of satellites happening all around the world that orbit around this global, high-powered, high production value, can't miss plenary sessions. The workshops range from

new paradigms for artificial intelligence, deploying artificial intelligence as a means to care for one another, as a new paradigm. Also includes things like measuring human flourishing in the real world, things like economics in human flourishing, how can the market economy

and policies related to the market economy translate into measures that are important for flourishing. We've got an amazing focus also on neuroscience and the different developmental pathways to flourishing that happen during childhood and adolescence. So looking at this from a very basic neuroscience, what's happening in the brain at that time, how do we measure that and map those different factors in terms of positive

outcomes for children. And so, you know, anything from economics to artificial intelligence, neuroscience, human psychology, we have workshops focused on all of those areas. And then lastly, we will also have an open call for abstracts where anyone can contribute their new ideas for showcasing either in a spotlight talk

or in a book that we will produce and publish on our website platform.

Let's turn our attention to one of the presenters at the upcoming conference. Longtime Stories of Impact listeners might remember the Stories We Tell Ourselves episode featuring Dr. Brie Linkenhoker, founder and CEO of Worldview Studio in Menlo Park, California, a collective of brain and behavioral scientists, human-centered designers, and multimedia producers who create innovative learning experiences.

What aspects of Dr. Lincoln-Hoker's groundbreaking work in intelligence will be highlighted throughout the Human Flourishing Conference? We're going to be exploring how the very notion of intelligence could change over the next several decades through the lens of human flourishing. We're going to be asking questions about artificial intelligence and collective intelligence, and how it might change how we even think about what intelligence is.

But importantly, we're going to be doing this through the lens of normative futures, the futures we want. So much of the conversation around artificial intelligence has been focused on, you know, the doomsday scenarios, the nightmare scenarios. And those are important.

But if we don't have visions of the kind of future we might want, the future that could be enabled or advanced by changes in technology, then we don't really have anything to shoot for as a society, as entrepreneurs, as people who can make that future come to pass.

So we think it's going to be important to spend a couple of days with research into more equitable, more diverse futures so that this group can come together and say, hey, what kind of futures would we want to come to pass? What would those look like? How would humans flourish in different good futures? And then what does that mean for the decisions we might make now?

What are Dr. Linkenhoker's plans for the conference conversations around intelligence? I hope and expect that we have different ideas about what intelligence is now and what it could be. When you ask someone who is developing AIs versus someone who's a developmental psychologist versus someone who thinks about intelligence from the lens of global business,

versus somebody who's in the defense industry, right? You're going to get different visions of what intelligence is. And we're really actually looking forward to hearing those different definitions in their working states now, as well as visions for what we might think of intelligence being in the future. Who will be included in her workshop sessions? We're

We're going to hear from people who are really at the forefront of the technological capabilities that are emerging in the AI space, but also from people who are tracking how AI is being applied in the world at small to very large levels, how it's transforming the future of work, and also just how we as toolmakers of AI are starting to understand what AI is and what it can do in the future better and in different ways.

The second panel we'll hear from is on collective intelligence. And that panel is going to be exploring what will it mean to be able to know much, much more than we do now about ourselves and the world around us? How might we act on that information differently? How might we make better decisions, whether that information is about our genomes or our current individual health or the health of our planet or what's going on in our economy globally in real time?

At the end of the day, we'll have a reflection panel on what we've heard and what some of the major themes have been around human flourishing. Where have they connected to these ideas about what good futures can be for us as humans living on this planet?

The second day we're going to be working together to create different normative futures on human flourishing and intelligence. So a normative future is one where you say, "Hey, what kind of future would we want?" We've just heard in the day before about all the things that might be happening in AI. We've heard about how collective intelligence could fundamentally change what and how we know about the world and who knows it.

Okay, now let's take that information and feed it into some storytelling that we do in small groups around what a good future might look like. What would that good future entail? You know, paint a picture for us. And then let's walk backwards a little bit and say, how did we get here? What are the regulatory systems? What are the...

ultimate goals? What are the ethical issues we're going to have to work out? What are the equity and diversity and inclusion issues we're going to have to attend to along this path? And importantly, what are some of the ways we could get off the path if we're not careful along the way? Why are these conversations so vital? We are not trying to predict the future here, but we do want to make sure that we have a diversity of voices contributing to this work about

about what a good future looks like. We're just at the beginning of understanding how tools that are likely in the early phase of their development can be employed very, very powerfully in many, many different domains. People are working on using AI to do everything from understanding how our

Our discussions societally about immigration have changed over 200 years, right? To understand whether this moment is really especially polarized in the grand history of the United States or not. We know there are people working on AI applications in human movement.

to eventually be able to predict falls and provide tiny little supports in the clothing that you might wear to prevent those falls. We know there are people who are working on AI and education to be able to provide more individualized instruction at low cost and grand scale across the world. That's just three areas, right? There are so many others.

And we also know that AI, the tools within AI itself, I shouldn't say itself, maybe themselves, are also taking off really rapidly. There are more calls now to really get under the hood with AI development and understand more of its principles, its structures,

so that there's less of a kind of wondrous black box of AI and more of a, we have a theory, we have a concept, we have things that we can test even in the process of this AI learning from a very complex data set. So,

The evolution is extremely rapid, but I think what is really important right now is that we're seeing all of this possibility for how AI and relatedly collective intelligence, which often but not always involves the application of AI, can...

really radically change what we do and how we do it and what we know right now. What are the ethical questions to consider in working with AI? There are a lot of great people working on ethics and morality in AI, and I am not an expert in this.

But the issues really range from the kind of obvious surface level things like privacy and transparency, right? If an AI is making a decision that has meaning, maybe you should know that it's an AI that's making that decision. Maybe you should know what kind of parameters it's using to make the decision that affects you in life, right? That's kind of an obvious surface level kind of issue, but it's very important.

You know, a next level down is going back to that black box issue with AI and also connected to the training data that AIs have, right? AIs can't learn from the world unless you give them something to learn from. That's true whether it's learning about traffic patterns or what's going on in a human brain or how people learn. In every case, you have to provide the AI with data to learn from.

If your data is biased that you give to the AI, your algorithms are going to be biased that come out of that artificial intelligence and get employed by it. So there's a lot of work being done in that space as well, trying to understand and identify bias and data sets and become aware of that as we deploy AIs into the world.

At a deeper level, we get into issues around personhood, responsibility, and the way that we understand people.

the role that non-human intelligences can play in our lives. How will we relate to them? How will we think about them? Will we invest them with responsibility? Can AIs have free will? You know, there are many of those really deep questions. And as we ask those questions about machine intelligences, we fully expect that they're going to lead us to ask some of those questions in different ways about ourselves.

So one of the issues we know is going to come up is how will living with AIs change our own cognition?

Already, there are lots of things that we outsource that we used to spend a lot of brain time on, right? Most of us used to have a much better sense of the geography of our local environments. Now we outsource that to Google Maps, right? There are a lot of things like that just in our own lifetimes. I mean, how many people's phone numbers do you remember?

You might remember phone numbers from the 1980s, but if you met somebody recently, you don't remember their phone number because you don't have to. So one of the questions is going to be, how will our cognition change? What will we do with the additional cognitive space that we have? Will we spend it on funny cat videos? Will we spend it on being better people, on making better decisions? What will more...

intelligence about the world around us or about what's going on in our own bodies, how will that affect our decision-making as humans? So there are a lot of fantastic questions that we can dig into. There's no way we'll get to them all within a day and a half, but even if we just

surface some of these questions in a meaningful way that gives us a good roadmap to go forward. Since artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on the coming modern age, how does Dr. Lincoln-Hoker anticipate AI will contribute to the conversation around human flourishing? When we look at representations of AI in popular media,

There are some really clear themes that pick up on our fears, right? So you think of HAL, you think of the new movie with the AI in robot form called Megan. And what you see are artificial intelligences that were essentially created to serve humans

developing their own agendas and acting without the kind of moral codes that we expect our fellow humans to act with most of the time. I think that those fears will always be with us and they're very important. How we deal with them

is going to be really interesting. So there are some people out there who are saying we need to make sure we've got the right limits to AI to make sure that AIs can never develop those capabilities. There are other people out there saying, no, let's train them on better data sets to enable them to make

more moral decisions in the future and maybe also have some limits there in terms of what kind of power we give them. But I think for the purpose of this conference, one of the big questions is going to be what role do we want artificial intelligences to play in our lives? I should say what roles do we want, plural, do we want for artificial intelligence to play in our lives?

And when we ask that question through the lens of human flourishing, it's a different question, right? If you ask the question, like, what are the nightmare scenarios? You can name them and then you can try to create safeguards to prevent them. But if you ask, how can humans flourish in

through life with AIs, that's a really different question. And in all likelihood, neither question is sufficient on its own. But you put them together and you start to get not only, hey, here are the, you know, the restrictions, the guidelines, the boundaries that we have to have in place, but also like, here are some of the design principles that will help us get to better AIs and better AI human relationships from the very beginning. That's really the goal.

So how can we support the development of AI that will offer us the best relationships with humans? We have to look at AI through the lens of human-centered design. We have to understand...

What people want from AI, what people are likely to do with AI-based tools when they become available. One of the things we've seen over and over again in the history of technology is that you often get to unintended consequences when people use a technology in a way that's different from the way that their designers thought that technology would be used. But if you spend more time

Trying to understand what's driving people to want to use a tool. What things are they not as concerned about that you think they maybe should be concerned about? You know, how might they take some of these tools and adapt them for good or nefarious ends? The more you try to understand, I think, the human desire side, the human value side, the human fear side, the more...

accurate and complex a picture you're likely to get of the future paths of AI. It's also going to be really important to take on these questions of power and power dynamics within AI. So there are many different scholars and people within industry trying to understand

what a future might look like where the greatest AI-based tools are centered in the hands of just a few people who can use them to make extraordinary wealth for themselves and to control much of the way that other people interact with those tools. So, you know, I do think that a conversation about economics

Equity, access, democratization, transparency, common regulatory systems, all of those questions are going to be part of this bigger conversation about human flourishing.

Especially with the attention of communities like that of the Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing, does Dr. Linkenhoker feel optimistic about the future of relationships between human intelligence and technological intelligence? I want to believe that

humans can continue to learn our way into being our best selves. I know a lot about our follies, you know, the biases that we bring to decision-making, the ways that, you know, conversation that needs to happen gets polarized and to such a degree that the good stuff never really gets said. But I also just have to believe optimistically that,

in our ability to continue our evolution as, for me, created beings, but certainly humans with extraordinary capacity for altruism, for cooperation, for storytelling that can guide us collectively in good directions. I know that we're not going to take an easy, smooth path to get there, but

But I think just to kind of live my life, I have to believe that there are at least some futures where we learn to use these tools in a way that helps us make better decisions about our care for our environment. That helps us make better decisions about the allocation of our resources, that help us

distribute technologies in such a way that we can advance our common economic development in ways that aren't so bad for the future of the earth. So for me, I have to remain optimistic about

If we don't have a vision for the futures that we want, we're not going to get there, right? If we only have the visions for the dystopian stuff, the best we're going to be able to do is play defense all the time. But we've got to have visions for a good future, a future that benefits all of us in which we flourish and our earth flourishes. So I hope that by starting to tell some of those stories, we can begin to lay a path for getting there.

The Global Conference on Human Flourishing will be broadly publicized and available to anyone who can access the Internet, and TWCF believes it will attract people who are interested in exploring what it means to flourish and how science can contribute to these age-old questions. What is the newest information? And the inspirational stories and discoveries, the new breakthroughs,

Any curious mind looking for answers can log in and participate in the conference for free. And since this is just the first of many such human-flourishing conferences, you'll want to be there from the beginning to see how the future of the event unfolds.

We envision this to be a global annual event that brings together many different funders, many different media brands, platforms, and kinds of expertise. We've already set up a world-class program advisory committee, which brings together a number of the world's best

and thought leaders on the topic of flourishing. That's one structure that we've set up that we're really excited about, this program advisory committee that's really world-class. But we also want other partners to contribute as well. So we are hosting workshops in collaboration with many world-leading universities and research groups

around the world, but we're also interested in other partners in the future. And so we see this as a broad community. It's not something that's solely owned or solely focused on the Templeton Foundations. We want this to be something that's a broad tent that anybody who's interested in the topic can contribute to in the future.

If you attend this cutting-edge conference, you'll meet another two participants that we'll feature on our next episode. Dr. Duncan Assel, University of Cambridge professor, who will present a two-day session at the Human Flourishing Conference on the ground in Cambridge, England, exploring diverse trajectories to good developmental outcomes.

Dr. Assel's research focuses on child education and how leading-edge educational systems can best serve the needs of a diversity of student learners. And you'll hear from Maritza Trejo, Regional Director for Education Programs for Glasswing, which explores the root causes and consequences of violence, poverty, trauma, and migration. ♪

In the Human Flourishing Conference and on the podcast, she'll share the results of her program implementing a character strengths developing initiative into after-school programs in El Salvador, which holds the unenviable title of the most violent non-war zone in the world. These are just two of the many researchers whose innovative programming and tools for human flourishing will be featured at the conference. The rest?

You'll just have to attend and learn for yourself. To learn more about the scientific research behind human flourishing, join us November 29th and 30th for the virtual first annual Global Scientific Conference on Human Flourishing. To attend this can't-miss opportunity, register at humanflourishing.org. Again, that's humanflourishing.org.

I hope that you'll attend this first-ever annual Global Scientific Conference and join thousands of other like-minded, curious thinkers and questioners who want to learn more about human flourishing. I know it's going to be an incredible experience for all the attendees.

We'll be back in two weeks with a wrap-up with Dr. Andrew Sarazin, and we'll share the work of Dr. Duncan Assel and Maritza Trejo. In the meantime, we at the Stories of Impact podcast wish you a Thanksgiving that is beautiful, peaceful, abundant, joyful, and connected to the people with whom you flourish. We are thankful for you.

This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergei and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. With senior producer Katie Flood. Music by Alexander Filippiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.