AI’s Future Depends on Whether It Augments or Replaces Human Purpose

Russell Wald opened Stanford HAI’s October 28, 2026 conference by naming a tension he said many people feel “often in the same breath”: hope and fear about AI. He located that tension in familiar places—headlines, new product announcements, and the AI billboards lining San Francisco’s streets. The question, he said, is what people do with it.

Wald framed the day around taking a more active role in shaping AI and having greater agency over how it enters people’s lives. The conference description makes the stakes concrete: students, workers, and leaders are anxious about AI’s rapid acceleration, but those fears are valid, not inevitable. The distinction is not simply between accepting technology and rejecting it. It is whether progress is shaped to support human capabilities, or comes at the expense of human dignity.

The stated aim is to build and use AI in ways that strengthen human purpose, creativity, and independence. The conference description also puts that aim in practical terms: tools should augment rather than replace those capacities, widening what a person can learn, build, and discover. That is a more demanding standard than asking whether a system works or whether it is adopted. It asks what the tool enables people to do, and whether its use leaves them with room to direct their own work and lives.

The conference’s focus on research, policy, and design connects that standard to different kinds of choices. Research concerns what is developed and what capabilities it can offer. Design concerns how people encounter and use those capabilities. Policy concerns the conditions under which AI is built and used. The description does not specify particular approaches in any of these areas; it identifies them as parts of the work needed to make augmentation, rather than replacement, the aim.

Wald described Stanford HAI as an institute spanning AI and data science research, education, policy, and practice. Launched in 2019, it draws faculty and students from all seven of Stanford’s schools, as well as partners across industry, government, and civil society. He said those groups are united by the idea that AI should enable human flourishing.

That institutional breadth matches the conference’s premise. The question of whether AI supports people’s capabilities cannot be confined to technical development alone: the stated agenda joins research with policy and design, and places those choices alongside education and practice. The aim is not just to make more powerful tools, but to shape how they serve human purposes.

Wald introduced James Landay, HAI’s co-founder and Denning faculty director, to begin the conference. He described Landay, a professor of computer science, as someone whose career has been devoted to human-centered technology. The introduction positioned Landay’s work within a day focused on the choices ahead: how AI advances, and whether people can shape that advance to support purpose, creativity, and independence.