Jonathan Teubner

Jonathan Teubner Human Flourishing Harvard Oxford 2026 InstructorJonathan Teubner

Research Associate, Human Flourishing Program,

Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University

Cambridge, UK

 

 

About the Session

Designing AI for Human Flourishing
 
Technology, at its best, is a tool crafted and deployed by human beings for human beings. However, modern digital and AI-driven technologies are often accepted as autonomous forces shaping society according to their own internal logic, independent of human values, cultural norms, and ethical considerations. This mistaken assumption—entertained by both tech optimists and tech pessimists—ignores the fundamental truth that technology is deeply embedded in human contexts. This session will focus on how to re-embed technology within a rich understanding of human flourishing, ensuring AI is developed and deployed in the service of individuals and communities rather than as a self-perpetuating system.

About the Presenter

Jonathan D. Teubner, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program, where he leads the AI and Flourishing Initiative. He has published widely in the fields of the history of philosophy, theology, and cultural sociology. He is the author of Charity after Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018), the latter of which won the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise in 2019.

Along with Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross, Teubner is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook to the Historical Reception of Theology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025). Teubner has held faculty positions at the Australian Catholic University and at the University of Virginia, where he led a collaborative team of data scientists and scholars across the social sciences to create AI tools to predict political and social violence.

Teubner’s insights and analysis have appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Hill, he is regularly interviewed by BBC, CNN, Scripps News and NBC Nightly News, and is a contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review.

In 2022, he co-founded FilterLabs, a data analytics company that leverages artificial intelligence to source high-quality localized data in hard-to-reach regions of the world.