Founder, Noēsis Collaborative; Research Fellow, Harvard Human Flourishing Program @HFHarvard; Words: @NewStatesman @AmericanAffrs @Newsweek
Paris, France
Joined June 2009
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Ron Ivey retweeted
6/13 This is especially important for current AI because it is anthropomimetic: trained to reproduce the observable products of human cognition and conversation.
So human-like behaviour can be evidence — but also a confound. Systems may produce the signs we normally associate with consciousness precisely because they were trained to do so.
The default mode of AI is centralized power and wealth at the expense of human agency. A few AI owners become super wealthy, ai becomes super intelligent and the rest of us, the members of the future underclass become super dumb and super reliant on systems we don't own or control. At the @UniofOxford Civic AI Conference with Ambassador @audreyt, Prof. @RosalindPicard from @medialab and Prof. Caroline Green at @EthicsInAI we charted alternative pathways to pro-human, pro-agency, & decentralized ai that supports human flourishing in our families, communities, and democracies.
In this short interview from the Civic AI Conference 2026, Ron Ivey (@ronivey), founder and CEO of Noēsis Collaborative, reflects on what Civic AI means to him and considers how AI should be used to support our communities and who gets to decide how it should be used.
🎥 If you haven't had the chance to watch our full panel discussions from the conference yet, please visit our YouTube playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…
🔗 Learn more about Civic AI: afp.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk…
#WhyAIEthicsMatters #CivicAI #6PackOfCare
@audreyt
Ron Ivey retweeted
1/ One of my biggest projects of the last year at @LeverhulmeCFI: with @ronivey and a fantastic group of researchers, policy experts, and young people, we asked what AI policy would look like if we optimised for child flourishing rather than just minimising harms.
Lots of debates on this site the last few days about what AI can and can't do and whether it is or isn't conscious.
While these are extremely important debates, today I want to focus on what is much easier to find agreement on: what AI should or shouldn't do to kids and youth. We missed the moment to be clear on this with Social Media. Let's not miss the moment with Social AI.
@Noesis_Collab in partnership with @dioscuri & @LeverhulmeCFI worked with a group of leading researchers, AI policy experts, and youth leaders on the question: how might we design AI policy for child and youth flourishing?
Our research and recommendations here: noesiscollaborative.org/flou… @deanwball @Livingstone_S @samhiner @ncypalliance @RaviDataIyer @drtimlomas
Lots of debates on this site the last few days about what AI can and can't do and whether it is or isn't conscious.
While these are extremely important debates, today I want to focus on what is much easier to find agreement on: what AI should or shouldn't do to kids and youth. We missed the moment to be clear on this with Social Media. Let's not miss the moment with Social AI.
@Noesis_Collab in partnership with @dioscuri & @LeverhulmeCFI worked with a group of leading researchers, AI policy experts, and youth leaders on the question: how might we design AI policy for child and youth flourishing?
Our research and recommendations here: noesiscollaborative.org/flou… @deanwball @Livingstone_S @samhiner @ncypalliance @RaviDataIyer @drtimlomas
Ron Ivey retweeted
The decline of online dating is one of the clearest recent examples of technology serving people’s immediate impulses at the expense of what they actually want, and making them miserable in the process. Very important we don’t make the same mistakes with AI.
Ron Ivey retweeted
We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas
Ron Ivey retweeted
Norway has announced strict new limits on the use of generative AI in schools. Starting in late August 2026, primary school students aged 6 to 13 (grades 1–7) will generally be prohibited from using generative AI tools in the classroom. Students aged 14 to 16 may use them only under direct teacher supervision.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre emphasized that schools should prioritize teaching children to read, write, and master mathematics through traditional methods, rather than relying on AI shortcuts. Officials argue that early exposure to powerful AI tools risks undermining critical cognitive development by allowing students to bypass foundational learning steps.
This policy builds on Norway’s successful 2024 restrictions on smartphones in schools, which studies link to improved grades, reduced bullying, and better student mental health. The government is also promoting greater use of physical books and offline learning materials.
By drawing a clear line between technological tools and early childhood development, Norway has become one of the first Western countries to set firm legal boundaries on AI in education, potentially influencing global approaches.
The encyclical is being framed as anti-AI. It's not. It's revealing that a small group of people are using a powerful technology to shape our attention for their business models, reform our values, displace our relationships, and concentrate power and wealth into their hands.
It asks the rest of us whether we'll passively accept their narrative or write a new story where we get to build and use technologies that benefit all of us, not just a powerful few.
NY Times Piece -> nytimes.com/2026/05/26/us/po…
Ron Ivey retweeted
As evidenced by the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity, we are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human. It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is not technological, but anthropological, and it is my hope that the Encyclical Letter to be published within a few days will contribute to answering this challenge.
Ron Ivey retweeted
NEW: The House counterpart to Sens. Hawley & Blumenthal's GUARD Act has been introduced by @ValerieFoushee and @RepBlakeMoore following the Senate version’s unanimous passage in committee today. The bill would hold Big Tech liable for AI chatbots that exploit minors.
Ron Ivey retweeted
David Foster Wallace on why people struggle to read books:
(this was filmed in 2003 but is even more true today)
Ron Ivey retweeted
New essay on the economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work.
1. Almost any question about the impact of advanced AI on the economy needs to start at the same place: what is still scarce? Answer that, and the analysis becomes pretty straightforward. This essay explores what becomes scarce if AI really can replicate most of what humans do in production, and what this mean for the future of jobs.
2. My conjecture, working through the economics: labor reallocates across sectors, and the sector it reallocates to has properties that keep labor a meaningful share of the economy. Ultimately this is about the structure of demand itself. For this, we have to go back to Girard, Augustine and Rousseau: once people's base needs are met, their preferences shift to comparative motives (e.g., status, exclusivity, social desirability). This motive is inherently non-satiated.
4. The key paper is Comin, Lashkari, and Mestieri (Econometrica 2021). As people get richer, they don't buy proportionally more of everything. They shift spending toward sectors with higher income elasticity. They estimate income effects account for 75%+ of observed structural change.
5. The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs.
6. So the question is: which sectors have high income elasticity in a post-AGI world? I argue it's what I call the relational sector. Categories where the human isn't just an input into production, it is part of the value.
7. Why does the relational sector have high income elasticity? Because human desire has a mimetic, relational dimension. We don't just want things for their intrinsic properties. We want what others want, and we want it more when others can't have it. Girard, Rousseau, Augustine, and Hobbes all saw this.
8. In work with Kristóf Madarász, we showed this experimentally: WTP roughly doubles when a random subset of others is excluded from the good. And in new work with Graelin Mandel, AI involvement kills the premium. Human-made art gains 44% from exclusivity; AI-made art only 21%.
9. This all comes together for the core argument. The sector that absorbs spending as AI makes commodity production cheap is one where human provenance is part of the value, and demand for it grows faster than income. Exactly the profile that keeps labor meaningful.
10. To be clear about the claim: I'm NOT saying aggregate labor share must rise. It may fall. The claim is about sectoral composition, i.e., where expenditure and employment go once commodities get cheap, and the fact that the sector that will absorb reallocated labor maps to a substantial component of human preferences and desire.
11. If you're interested in the formal model, a linked companion technical note works out all the economics.
Read the essay here: aleximas.substack.com/p/what…
Fascinating....
NEW AI report from Google.
Every prior intelligence explosion in human history was social, not individual.
These authors make the case that the AI "singularity" framed as a single superintelligent mind bootstrapping to godlike intelligence is fundamentally wrong.
This is directly relevant to anyone designing multi-agent systems.
They observe that frontier reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 spontaneously develop internal "societies of thought," multi-agent debates among cognitive perspectives, through RL alone.
The path forward is human-AI configurations and agent institutions, not bigger monolithic oracles.
This reframes AI scaling strategy from "build bigger models" to "compose richer social systems."
It argues governance of AI agents should follow institutional design principles, checks and balances, role protocols, rather than individual alignment.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.20639
Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: academy.dair.ai/
75 years ago, Alan Turing published the article, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, introducing the test that shaped how we think about machine intelligence. In 2025, AI chatbots now exhibit conversational behaviors that some argue meet the spirit of the Turing Test.
At the heart of our workshop was one urgent question for policymakers:
How might we design public policies for AI chatbots that advance youth wellbeing?
Check out this new interview of @deanwball Senior Fellow at the @JoinFAI from the Cambridge Gen AI and Youth Policy Workshop hosted by @noesiscollab & @LeverhulmeCFI. Dean's been a key thinker and strategist behind the US AI Action Plan. youtu.be/anIze_uS7CI?si=X17p…
Will AI strengthen human agency, wisdom, and relationships? Or will it quietly erode them?
That question led us to start Noēsis Collaborative.
We’re working on it with builders, leaders, and policymakers.
noesiscollaborative.org
