Flourishing-centered AI: designing AI for the multiple goods and tensions of living well

The rapid adoption of AI creates both opportunities and risks for human well-being and flourishing, underscoring the need for an integrative interdisciplinary framework to guide its design and evaluation. We advance a flourishing-centered AI framework that draws together philosophical, behavioral, interactional, and technical perspectives. We conceptualize human flourishing as multidimensional, encompassing subjective well-being, psychological functioning, character virtues, and psychological richness. This broader conception of flourishing extends existing approaches by explicitly incorporating character and other goods, and by confronting the possibility that these goods cannot always be maximized simultaneously. Two cross-cutting tensions arise: a temporal tension concerning immediate versus longer-term benefits, and a self-community tension concerning individual versus collective outcomes. We show how these tensions can be translated from behavioral objectives and measurable outcomes into interactional strategies and technical design choices. We conclude with implications for researchers and developers designing AI systems and for policymakers governing their use.