Superintelligence or Super Stupidity? Designing AI Systems for Human Flourishing

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on November 3rd from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Pat Pataranutaporn.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

As AI becomes woven into our daily lives and social institutions, we are becoming “cyborgs,” extending our minds and capabilities through technology. But greater technological capability does not automatically lead to greater human flourishing. How can we design AI that strengthens our ability to learn, create, connect, and make thoughtful decisions? In this talk, I will introduce an interdisciplinary approach to building AI systems and studying their effects on people. Through personalized AI prototypes and large-scale experiments, my research explores how AI can both enhance and undermine human decision-making, well-being, relationships, and sense of self. This work combines design, engineering, and qualitative and quantitative research to advance a science of human-AI interaction grounded in human flourishing. I will also explore how research can translate into real-world impact: from an AI digital twin that supports long-term thinking and has reached users in more than 100 countries, to research that has helped shape legislation protecting children from companion AI. Finally, I will discuss our efforts with collaborators across academia, industry, and government to develop the first open benchmark for AI’s impact on people. Together, these projects offer lessons for connecting technical innovation with evidence, public policy, and meaningful social change.

About the Speaker:

Pat Pataranutaporn, PhD is an assistant professor, technologist, and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group. He also serves as co-director of the MIT Media Lab Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) Research Program.

His research lies at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction, where he focuses on inventing, investigating, and inspiring next-generation human-AI systems for human flourishing, applying insights from human psychology to AI and understanding how AI impacts human psychology.

As founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, he leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers to develop and study how AI can both augment and diminish human learning, decision-making, critical thinking, creativity, and other critical dimensions of human experience. His group is among the first to investigate emerging phenomena through empirical studies examining how AI reshapes cognition, emotion, and behavior, from emotional dependence on AI companions and cognitive manipulation to false memory implantation, placebo effects of human-AI interaction, and the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence.

His research has been translated into real-world impact, ranging from Future You, a widely adopted AI digital twin for supporting long-term thinking that has been used in over 100 countries worldwide, to research that has shaped legislation protecting children from companion AI, and leading efforts to develop the first open benchmark for the human impact of AI in collaboration with leaders across academia, industry, and government.

Pataranutaporn’s research contributions have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, including ACM SIGCHI venues (CHI, IUI, DIS, ISWC, and AHs), ACM SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, ICML, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Biotechnology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM AI).

His work has been highlighted by the United Nations AI for Good forum and featured in Technology Review, the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Atlantic, Scientific American, the Wall Street Journal, and more. His work has also been honored as one of TIME’s “Best Inventions of 2023” and was included in Fast Company’s “2023 World Changing Ideas.”

Pataranutaporn has collaborated with researchers from both academia and industry, including teams from NASA, Stanford Medicine, Harvard, Mass General Brigham, UCSB, UCLA, UC Irvine, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, NTT Data, KBTG, and more.

He serves as an advisor to the Psychology of Technology Institute and Partnership on AI. He also served as co-creator and writer of the Netflix sci-fi anthology series Tomorrow and I, which premiered in 2024.