It all started with a simple, blunt statement over coffee. A friend looked up from his phone, sighed, and said: “AI will not make people happier.” As someone who spends most days immersed in artificial intelligence, I was taken aback. My knee-jerk response was to disagree – not because I believe AI is some magic happiness machine, but because I’ve never thought that making people happy was its purpose in the first place. To me, AI’s promise has always been about making life easier: automating drudgery, delivering information, solving problems faster. Happiness? That’s a complicated human equation, one I wasn’t ready to outsource to algorithms.