Future global wellbeing assessment: Conceptual foundations, governance & artificial intelligence

Abstract

This thesis examines how global wellbeing assessment might evolve in an increasingly globalised and digital society. It argues that, as wellbeing becomes a more explicit objective of global governance, a challenge arises over how it should be conceptualised and assessed across diverse cultural settings. Part 1 evaluates dominant approaches to wellbeing assessment, tracing the history to several key Western traditions in psychology and philosophy. It includes an argument against a bounded, individualised self being the foundational unit of societal wellbeing, and argues for societal wellbeing to be evaluated beyond the aggregation of self-evaluating individuals. It also explores alternative ontologies of who and what might be capable of experiencing wellbeing, and advocates considering views in which wellbeing exists not only within individual people, but also in the connections between people, in animals, and possibly in the environment more widely. It also argues for the importance of considering a wider range of cross-cultural ontologies in wellbeing assessment frameworks if they are to be used in global contexts, and the risk of ‘wellbeing imperialism’ if culturally biased views are applied globally. Part 2 explores a parallel trend of how technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way wellbeing is assessed. It explores the use of data from online platforms, large corpus analysis, and the use of sensor and wearable technology to infer aspects of wellbeing, like emotion and mental health. It speculates on how these may advance and be used to understand the wellbeing of society at scale, and may be incorporated into future wellbeing assessment systems in an increasingly digitised world. It evaluates both the promise of such systems and the risks, including privacy loss, bias, and misuse for corporate profits and government control. Technology and AI are presented as raising the stakes on the conceptual and ontological issues in Part 1. Overall, the thesis presents a broad exploration and synthesis of foundational concepts, ontologies, and technologies in assessing wellbeing, and forms connections across diverse disciplines and cultural contexts. Ultimately it aims to contribute to the discussion on the future of global wellbeing assessment frameworks.