Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are reshaping how we work, communicate, decide, and relate to one another. While most AI design focuses on efficiency and capability, a critical question has gone largely unanswered: how can AI systems be built in ways that preserve (and ideally strengthen) the constitutive characteristics of being human? We call this challenge pro-human AI design, and we call the set of those characteristics the Human Core. In this paper, we present a three-step methodology for implementing pro-human AI design, and instantiate it based on a concrete anthropological stance and a practical use case: (1) Identify the constitutive characteristics of the Human Core; concretely, through a synthesis of the humanities literature we find: connectedness (being relational and social), freedom (being autonomous), agency (following a vocation for shaping one's world), embodiment (being bodily situated in time and space and fundamentally limited), and transcendence (being in search of meaning). (2) Examine how a given AI system in a given use case interacts with these characteristics; concretely, we demonstrate the methodology through a healthcare use case, AI-assisted psychiatric session reporting. (3) Develop targeted technical interventions to minimize negative effects and support human flourishing in that context; concretely, we, show how a shift from automated report generation to AI-assisted text completion preserves the clinician's relational and professional agency. We further outline a path toward a benchmark for evaluating the pro-human quality of AI systems at scale. With this conceptual and practical framework for pro-human AI design, we hope to lay a foundation for a future of human-AI collaboration focused on human flourishing in a holistic sense, rather than on efficiency optimization at the cost of our human condition, and we invite researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to adopt this focus change.
Stadelmann et al. (2026) studied this question.