Happiness is the next AI KPI if Oxford boffins have their way

Researchers say public subsidies for AI should be repaid in wellbeing, not just economic growth

Mass unemployment, boiling the planet, and human extinction within a decade: the dystopian visions of AI are well rehearsed. Academics now argue that EU policymakers should ensure the taxpayers helping to fund the tech get something back, a “happiness dividend.” 

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), led by Professor Sandra Wachter, say citizens who are inadvertently helping to create the next generation of tech billionaires need more than promises that AI will boost economic growth and fatten corporate profits.

Their paper, "Optimising for happiness in EU technology policy to repay public subsidies for AI," published in the Royal Society Open Science, notes that the public backs AI development through funding, tax breaks, and access to land, water, energy, infrastructure, and data. 

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On data, most people have no say in the matter. Creative work, social media posts, and user interactions have all been swept up to train frontier models, spurring a stream of lawsuits.

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The OII team proposes happiness as a third goal for AI heavyweights, alongside economic growth and risk mitigation. “Making technology less harmful is not the same as making it socially beneficial,” the researchers told us. 

What makes people happy? The researchers point to relatedness, competence, and autonomy, all of which some uses of AI could undermine. Chatbots that mimic human emotion may erode the value people place on real human connection. Heavy reliance on AI could dull skills. AI influence could make it harder for people to make their own choices. And datacenters threaten land and water, leaving fewer trees and green spaces for people to connect with nature.

“Under the proposed approach, companies benefiting from public support would be expected to predict how their technologies will improve happiness and well-being, and be held accountable for delivering those benefits,” the researchers said. 

The EU has allocated €20 billion for AI gigafactories, while GenAI4EU and the Digital Europe programme is using €700 million through Horizon research projects into generative AI and supercomputing initiatives.

“The public already pays for AI through subsidies, resources, and data, yet has little say over what it gets in return,” said lead author Professor Sandra Wachter. “We believe people deserve technology that increases their happiness. If the public is helping to build the AI industry, it should also share in its benefits.” 

Denser, more powerful servers in a growing number of datacenters are drawing more energy, potentially pushing up household electricity bills. Memory makers are prioritizing higher-margin chips, so ordinary DRAM and NAND cost more, and so do the devices that use them. Water, which some see as the planet’s next most precious commodity, is being used to cool server racks.

Anthropic warned this year that humanity risks courting extinction unless powerful models are properly controlled. Last year it and OpenAI raised the prospect of mass unemployment as employers turn to AI to cut costs. The researchers add that the difficulty of getting data out of model makers and their cloud providers makes it harder to gauge the environmental damage datacenters are doing.

Against that backdrop, finding some way to improve people’s well-being looks essential. Will the model makers take note? Even pessimists are sometimes pleasantly surprised, though we expect profits will trump pleasantness.  ®