What does it take to live a human life?
Across 13 life domains, we continually encounter needs to fulfill, decisions to make and moments to act. This initiative focuses on the knowledge needed to understand the functioning of human capacity, the effects of surrounding conditions, and the institutional choices that enable us to maintain and expand our agency.
Expanding and protecting human capacity
Alongside institutions, policymakers, researchers and practitioners, this initiative aims to shape policies, products, services, environments and technologies that enable people to develop, maintain, recover and expand their capacities throughout life—and protect those capacities from avoidable depletion and constraint.
Expanding and Protecting Human CapacityHow do desired lives become possible?
People do not choose their lives from an unlimited set of possibilities. What they can imagine, pursue and sustain develops through experience and is shaped by their capacities, relationships, resources and surrounding conditions.
The question is not only what people want, but which possibilities they encounter, whether they can act on them, and whether institutions enable them to learn, adapt and change direction.
Explore Desired Lives →How possibilities develop
Conditions of possibility
From possibility to action
What does a human life look like from the inside?
Every human being has a unique configuration of capacities, needs, experiences and responsibilities. Human Capacity helps us understand the person in front of us — and the life they are living.
Explore Human Capacity →
Functional Capacity
Development Across Life
Current availability
Needs and supports
The life being lived
What kinds of lives are societies producing?
No human life exists in isolation. The lives people are able to build are shaped by the environments they encounter and by the people, institutions and systems through which resources, opportunities, demands and consequences are organized. Together, these arrangements produce different configurations of living—and distribute time, security, responsibility, possibility and strain differently across people and populations.
How do we make Human Capacity visible?
Profiles, assessments, indexes and standards provide a shared measurement layer for people, situations and systems — so we can understand what is, and build what could be.
Explore Measurement →Human capacity in AI-mediated environments
Artificial intelligence can expand what people are able to understand, decide, create and do. It can support learning and communication, reduce unnecessary demands, preserve or restore capacity, compensate for limitations and enable forms of participation that might otherwise remain beyond reach.
AI can also become part of the configuration through which people learn, work, decide and act. When it contributes to performance, the result does not by itself show what capability the person retains, what the AI supplied or what emerged through their particular configuration.
This research examines where capability resides when people and AI act together, how AI mediation affects human development over time, what AI-mediated performance legitimately demonstrates about a person, and how AI-constructed representations influence institutional decisions.
Explore AI and Human Capacity →Human Capacity is a collective project.
The Human Capacity Consortium brings together the stakeholders who study, develop, employ, govern, support and shape Human Capacity.
Explore the Consortium →
Educational institutions
Healthcare systems
Governments
Employers and industry
Communities and civil society
Faith and ethical institutions
Technology and system builders