Memorandum
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- Derek Weston via UX Collective
- Date
- Filed
- Society·5 min to read
- Re
AI's Potential for Good Depends on Human Choices, Advocates Say
ReAI's Potential for Good Depends on Human Choices, Advocates Say
From restoring speech for ALS patients to detecting breast cancer earlier, examples of beneficial AI show that positive outcomes are deliberate design decisions rather than accidents, according to a new essay.
Artificial intelligence is often framed as an existential threat, but a growing body of real-world examples suggests the technology's impact will depend on deliberate human choices about who it serves and how it is built. That is the central argument of a new essay that examines cases where AI has already delivered significant benefits, from restoring speech to people with neurodegenerative disease to catching cancers earlier.
The essay opens with the story of Casey Harrell, a climate activist whose ability to speak was gradually taken by ALS. In July 2023, surgeons at UC Davis implanted tiny sensor arrays in the part of his brain that controls speech. AI learned to interpret the signals his brain sends when he tries to talk, converted them into words, and spoke those words aloud in a voice rebuilt from old recordings of him. The first time he heard it, he said it felt a lot like him. People who had not heard his voice in a long time cried.
That outcome was not a lucky accident, the essay argues. Every product is a stack of decisions: who it serves, what it rewards, and what it refuses to do. A feed that keeps users scrolling at 2 a.m. is a design choice, just as a tool that hands someone back their evening is. Good AI stories, while harder to find in an endless stream of doom and gloom, share a common thread: someone decided who the technology was for, put the right people in the room, and kept humans in charge.
In medicine, the evidence is mounting. In Sweden, Lund University ran the MASAI trial, involving around 106,000 women in the national screening program. Half had their mammograms read the traditional way, half with AI support. The AI group saw 29 percent more cancers detected, and final results showed 12 percent fewer cancers slipping through between screenings, including fewer of the aggressive kind. The essay's author, a carrier of the breast cancer gene who has had at least one mammogram a year since turning 30, writes about worrying not for herself but for her daughters.
Beyond cancer, AI is reshaping biology. For 50 years, working out the 3D shape of a single protein could take a scientist years. In 2020, DeepMind's AlphaFold learned to predict those shapes from a sequence alone. Two years later, its team released predicted structures for more than 200 million proteins. It has since been used by over three million researchers in more than 190 countries, and its creators won the Nobel Prize. At MIT, researchers trained an AI to scan more than 100 million chemical compounds for ones that could kill bacteria. It found halicin, which killed strains resistant to every known antibiotic in lab tests, and later abaucin.
Accessibility is another frontier. Be My Eyes, founded in Denmark by a blind furniture craftsman, began as an app connecting blind people with sighted volunteers over video. In 2023, it added Be My AI: point a phone at a menu, a medicine label, or an outfit, and get a detailed description back. The essay describes this as part of a broader shift in which interfaces adapt to people rather than the other way around, potentially serving different bodies, voices, attention spans, and bad days.
The essay also points to creative work. Low-income filmmakers can now tell their stories using accessible generative AI for film, and the author describes using AI to reformat writing, convert handwriting to digital documents, and automate the organizational layer of a creative process. Last month, the author built an app to track ideas as voice notes, automatically categorizing them and surfacing them based on activity and location.
The through-line is that technology is never neutral, and the potential for harm is enormous, which means the potential for good is too. The question the essay poses is not whether AI will change society, but whether people will make more of the choices that steer it toward benefit rather than harm.
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