"We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?"
"As a month of fasting, reflection, communal prayer, and charitable giving, it is a structured annual recalibration of values. Not as sentiment, but as practice. What strikes an outside observer is how those values echo across traditions-Buddhist non- attachment, Christian charity, Jewish Tikkun Olam, Hindu Seva, secular humanism's care for the commons. They also map with striking precision onto the emerging framework of ProSocial AI-a paradigm asking the same urgent question of technology that every wisdom tradition has asked of its followers:"
Rapid advances in AI, the spread of agentic systems into workplaces, healthcare, and governance, shifting geopolitical alliances, and worsening planetary signals create an urgent need to define optimization goals. Ramadan, observed by over 1.8 billion Muslims, models a structured practice of fasting, reflection, communal prayer, and charitable giving that recalibrates values and resonates with other ethical traditions. Those moral practices align with ProSocial AI, which designs systems to enhance human well-being, equity, and sustainability rather than to maximize engagement or commercial returns. ProSocial AI operates across individual, community, and planetary levels. The stakes are not theoretical.
Read at Psychology Today
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