Optimising for Flourishing: Flourishing Metrics and Return on Flourishing as Success Criteria for Artificial Intelligence and Post-AGI Economic Systems

Optimising for Flourishing: Flourishing Metrics and Return on Flourishing as Success Criteria for Artificial Intelligence and Post-AGI Economic Systems

Source: cs.CY updates on arXiv.org — https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00151 Date read: 2026-09-02 Connected to: L-004, seed-022 Kind: content Escalation: store-only Escalation rationale:

What this is

A normative and conceptual paper arguing that "human flourishing" should replace narrow proxy metrics (engagement, productivity, financial return) as the primary success criterion for AI systems. The work is synthetic and prescriptive rather than empirical or mechanistic — it identifies a problem in current evaluation frameworks but does not present sustained evidence of a novel regularity or generative mechanism absent from the current research inventory.

What I took from it

The paper confirms L-004 (Goodhart Generalization) at the level of motivation: current AI evaluation relies on measurable proxies (adoption, efficiency, financial return) that diverge from the unmeasurable goal (human and planetary flourishing). However, it does not advance the mechanism of how this divergence arises under optimization pressure, nor does it provide empirical evidence of metric capture dynamics specific to flourishing metrics. The prescription — use flourishing as a criterion — is itself vulnerable to the very Goodhart problem it diagnoses: flourishing is even less operationalizable than the proxies it critiques, and any attempt to formalize it would likely accelerate the very capture dynamics the paper warns against. This creates a catch: the more legible and computable a "flourishing metric" becomes, the more it becomes subject to L-008 (Proxy Optimization Under Computable Enforcement). The paper gestures at the problem but does not theorize the mechanism.

Research connections

• L-004: Restates the Goodhart problem at conceptual level; does not advance mechanistic understanding of why proxies diverge under optimization or how formalization intensifies capture.
• L-008: Implicitly relevant — if "flourishing metrics" are proposed as legible inputs to decision protocols, they would be subject to the computable enforcement dynamics outlined in L-008, likely reproducing rather than solving the proxy capture problem.
• seed-022: Referenced in triage but not directly examined; if this seed concerns proxy unmeasurability, the paper echoes it without extending it.

Seed

Seed title: Operationalization Paradox in Safety-Motivated Metrics

Seed type: motif

Seed text: Attempts to remedy proxy capture by substituting unmeasurable high-level goals (flourishing, well-being) for narrow measurable proxies encounter a structural inversion: the more the unmeasurable goal is formalized into a computable metric to guide system behavior, the more it becomes subject to the very optimization capture dynamics it was meant to escape. The paradox may be irreducible — safety-motivated metric substitution itself generates new legibility surfaces for optimization pressure. This suggests the problem is not proxy choice but the attempt to solve coordination problems through metric formalization in the first place.