Deployed as mere efficiency, AI accelerates extraction. Deployed with intent, it could serve a different economy. Which are we building?
This is not a Lab about what AI can do. Most of that conversation has already been had, and most of it perpetuates the pattern rather than interrupting it. The framing "AI for good" is itself part of the problem — it takes as given the systems the tools will be deployed inside, and celebrates efficiency gains within them. That framing produces a marginally faster version of the same broken flows. The framing this Lab is built to test is different. Which specific pieces of the Well-being Economy — the measurement of collective flourishing, the coordination of catalytic capital across geographies, the pattern-recognition required for place-based transformation at scale, the formation of the next generation of stewards, the decision architecture that keeps a place coherent across generations — actually require AI infrastructure to work? Which of those pieces has to be built now, and by whom, before the incumbent paradigm captures the space? What does it take to build AI infrastructure that is structurally aligned with well-being rather than extraction — in intent, in ownership, in data rights, in incentive design? And who around this table is willing to underwrite the first prototype?
