By Mitchel Resnick

Earlier this year, I participated in the SIGCSE conference, the special interest group for computer science education. Cecilia Aragon, a professor at University of Washington, gave the opening keynote and she focused on the idea of “Human-Centered AI”. It was certainly a timely topic, and I agreed with much of what she had to say. As we design new AI tools, it is certainly important that we take into account the needs, the interests, and the experiences of people.

But as I thought about it, I felt that the framing of “human-centered AI” was too narrow. As AI technologies spread through our society and our culture, we need to think beyond the design of the AI tools themselves. So when I gave my talk at the conference the next day, I argued that we need to work towards a more human-centered society, and we need to create a more human-centered education so that young people develop the skills and mindsets they’ll need to create and flourish in today’s fast-changing world.

That might seem obvious. Of course society and education should be human-centered. But that’s not the way the world is heading these days. We live in a world where measurement, efficiency, and optimization are too often valued above human needs, interests, and experiences.

And I worry that the situation is becoming even worse. There are two huge disruptions in the world today: there’s the disruption caused by the proliferation of AI technologies and the disruption caused by the rise of authoritarian governments. Both of these disruptions could reduce the humanness of society, so that people have less choice and less voice in their lives. Because of these disruptions, a human-centered society is more needed than ever before, and also more threatened than ever before.