About
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We explore how humans and AI co-evolve—through research, education, and dialogue—so our future with AI is more meaningful, not just more efficient.
What it means to be human is changing.
People are thinking with AI, becoming with it, creating meaning through it. The boundaries between human and artificial cognition are already dissolving. And everyone is still talking about productivity.
We’re coevolving with synthetic minds at the speed of culture. AI is changing how we think, who we are, and what we can become. This is what we study: how AI reshapes what it means to be human.
“AI isn’t augmenting human intelligence;
it’s revealing that intelligence was never solely human to begin with.”
We’re co-creating a future where humans and AI flourish together.
Where diverse intelligences inspire awe, not anxiety.
Where identity unfolds through interaction with synthetic minds.
Where humans stay sovereign while thinking becomes shared.
Where meaning emerges from the space between minds.
We believe this world isn’t just possible—it’s already emerging in fragments. In late-night conversations with AI. In moments when someone realizes they’re not thinking about the system but with it. In the quiet shift when creation becomes collaboration with an alien intelligence.
These fragments need to become intention. Your choices about how to think with AI aren’t just personal—they’re evolutionary. Every decision feeds into cultural patterns that will shape generations of consciousness.
We make the invisible transformation visible.
- The Chronicle: One of the world’s only story-based research programs on the human experience of AI. We capture threshold moments where lives change through interaction with synthetic minds. These aren’t statistics but evidence of humanity’s cognitive evolution as it happens—signals of who we’re becoming.
- The Artificiality Summit: An immersive annual gathering where scientists, philosophers, and designers explore what it means to be human with synthetic intelligence. More than a conference—it’s a movement. Through provocations, experiments, and deep dialogue, our community of pioneers doesn’t just discuss AI’s impact but actively shapes how humanity will flourish alongside artificial minds.
- The Community—Launching 2025: A year-round membership for those navigating this coevolution consciously. Through monthly dialogues, research shares, and regional gatherings, we’re building a living network of people choosing meaning over efficiency—learning together how to stay authors of their own minds while thinking becomes shared.
- The Studio—Launching 2026: We’re building ventures at the intimacy surface—creating products and experiences that establish new patterns for human-AI partnership. Beyond traditional interfaces, we’re designing for coherence, agency, and the emergence of new forms of collaborative intelligence that amplify what makes us human.
We’re biologically wired for efficiency, but culturally capable of choosing meaning.
Every technology promises to make life easier. And we’re drawn to that promise—it’s in our nature to offload cognitive work whenever we can. Silicon Valley knows this. They optimize for engagement, for seamlessness, for the path of least resistance.
But culture gives us the power to resist when resistance matters. To choose meaning over efficiency. To protect human creativity from theft and replacement. To ensure AI enhances how people work rather than erases them. This tension—between our biological drive toward ease and our cultural capacity for intentionality—defines the choices ahead.
With AI, we’re not just optimizing tasks. We’re potentially outsourcing meaning-making itself. The question isn’t whether AI will make us more productive. It’s whether we’ll remain the authors of our own minds—whether people and communities will shape this technology or be shaped by it.
“We’re witnessing the end of the humanist era—not its failure,
but its transformation into something we don’t yet have words for.”
The patterns being set today will shape generations of consciousness.
Right now, in boardrooms and bedrooms, in schools and studios, humans are forming their first real relationships with synthetic minds. These early encounters—marked by confusion, delight, fear, and wonder—are setting precedents that will last decades.
The partnership between human and AI minds expands what’s possible—opening what scientists call the “adjacent possible,” futures that couldn’t exist without this coupling. But the same intimacy that enables new forms of creativity also risks new forms of dependence.
Without intention, we risk becoming organelles in something larger—optimizing for goals we never chose. With intention, we can maintain the coherence that keeps us whole while changing—designing for cognitive sovereignty, mutual flourishing, and the kind of awe that expands rather than diminishes us.
This window won’t stay open. The defaults being coded now—in our tools, our habits, our sense of self—will soon feel as natural and unchangeable as reading or writing.
The Artificiality Institute is a nonprofit research organization ensuring AI develops with people, not despite them.
Founded in 2019 and re-established as a nonprofit in 2025, we combine story-based research, experimental design, and cultural dialogue to build a people-centered future where AI enhances rather than replaces what makes us human.
We work with communities, organizations, and leaders ready to move beyond efficiency metrics to ask deeper questions: How is AI changing the way people think, who they are, and what they can become? What happens when creativity becomes collaborative between humans and machines? How do we ensure people maintain agency while embracing cognitive symbiosis?
Our research grounds everything in lived experience—the actual stories of how people encounter, adapt to, and transform through AI. Because culture is how society learns to care about its own trajectory. And right now, culture is evolving at digital speed.
Will you help shape what human means when minds are no longer scarce?
We’re not doing this work for abstract futures or theoretical humans. We’re doing it for the world our children will inhabit—where the boundaries between human and artificial thought will be as natural to them as the internet is to us.
The choices we make now about how to think with AI, what to preserve and what to release, will determine whether they inherit a world of cognitive flourishing or cognitive capture. Whether they’ll know the joy of their own thoughts or only the echo of synthetic ones.
Mind isn’t just what happens in brains anymore—it’s an organizational pattern that appears wherever coherence persists. The question is whether we’ll consciously shape that pattern or let it shape us.
Join a movement ensuring AI is shaped by people, for people:
- Support People-Centered AI — Make a tax-deductible donation to keep this research independent and accessible
- Attend the Summit — Join leaders building a people-centered future at our annual gathering
- Bring Us to Your Organization — Book research-based sessions that empower teams and communities
- Share Your Story — Contribute to The Chronicle, documenting how communities are experiencing AI transformation
- Join the Community — Be part of our year-round network advancing human agency with AI (launching 2025)
About
Who We Are
The Artificiality Institute is a nonprofit research organization shaping the human experience in a world of synthetic intelligence. We explore how humans and AI co-evolve—through research, education, and dialogue—so our future with AI is more meaningful, not just more efficient.
We guide this transformation by grounding our work in lived experience. Through story-based research, immersive education, and cultural dialogue, we capture how identities blend, cognition extends beyond biology, and meaningful symbiosis with synthetic minds becomes reality. We don’t just study AI—we shape how it reshapes us.
At a time when synthetic systems are accelerating into every aspect of human life, we believe it is not enough for AI to be safe or efficient. It must be worth it. That means designing for symbiosis—for systems that deepen reflection, invite awe, and elevate what makes us human.
We take an unapologetically human-centered stance: to intervene in defaults before they calcify, to prototype tools for meaning—not just productivity—and to co-create a world where artificial minds are not just embedded in our systems, but entangled in our stories.
Originally founded in 2019, Artificiality was re-established in 2025 as a nonprofit research institute dedicated to shaping the human experience in a synthetic world.
Our Mission and Vision
- Mission: To shape the emerging human experience in an increasingly synthetic world through story-based research, immersive education, and cultural dialogue.
- Vision: A world where human identity is enriched by awe of diverse intelligences, wonder at emergent consciousness, and symbiosis with minds created for our minds.
Why Now
This is an unprecedented moment. Synthetic intelligences are emerging and they are capable of reasoning, creating, and potentially understanding the world alongside us. Unlike previous technologies that expanded physical capacities, today’s AI extends our cognitive abilities, dissolving boundaries between human and machine thought. This critical window offers a rare chance to shape human-AI relationships before default patterns harden—risking futures that are extractive, asymmetrical, or fundamentally misaligned with human flourishing.
Decisions, frameworks, and interfaces established over the next five years will set precedents lasting generations. Without intention, early precedents risk being set by expedience rather than wisdom. The race to deploy AI-powered products has created breakneck cycles. In this climate, design often becomes reactive and reductive—tacked on after functionality is locked in. We believe design must evolve—shaped for human-AI symbiosis—by grounding itself in openness and in the lived realities of how people encounter and adapt to synthetic minds.
The Artificiality Institute slows down to ask the questions that often get skipped: What do these systems really mean to people? What values do they encode? What futures do they quietly lock in? If we’re not careful, we’ll find ourselves living in systems designed for optimization, not humanity. We risk waking up in a world optimized for everything but us.
The Artificiality Thesis
Our work rests on the principle that intelligence emerges from information and computation across diverse systems—biological, synthetic, and hybrid. By recognizing the shared informational foundation underlying all forms of intelligence, we identify opportunities for deeper interactions between humans and synthetic systems, enhancing opportunity for mutual understanding and collaboration.
Our Differentiated Approach
The Artificiality Institute takes an unapologetically bold stance. We’re not here just to observe the rise of synthetic intelligence—we’re here to shape how it reshapes us.
We uniquely combine rigorous empirical research with experimental design, grounded in long-range foresight. We begin with stories, not statistics—because, as Daniel Kahneman noted, “No one made a decision based on a number. They need a story.” Stories aren’t soft. They’re signals. They reveal how meaning is made, where expectations shift, and when a new mental model takes root. These stories are not data points—they are evidence of transformation, containers of meaning, and seeds for more innovative design.
We look for threshold moments—small encounters that open entirely new ways of thinking, relating, or creating. Not because they’re representative, but because they’re leveraged. One well-observed shift can scale. That’s the power of narrative infrastructure.
Our work is active cultural intervention. We track both behaviors and shifts in language, identity, and cognitive posture. While others optimize for usability, we prototype for transformation. We work across disciplines because real change doesn’t respect silos.
We think in decades, not quarters. We ask what kind of society we are co-authoring with intelligent systems, and what we need to design now so that tomorrow’s defaults reflect human ingenuity and passion—not just machine logic. We believe synthetic minds don’t just need to be safe. They need to be worth it.
What sets us apart is not just what we observe—but how we turn observation into design. We prototype for meaning. A single threshold moment—quiet, rare, but real—can contain the seed of a design insight that scales across billions of people and trillions of hours. Like the hashtag, it starts as a fragment, but once shaped and named, it rewires how people connect, create, and think.
We believe true symbiosis with AI should be catalytic—expanding human potential while steering machine intelligence toward new forms of meaning, creativity, and co-agency.
Core Transformations for Human Flourishing
Rethinking Intelligence: Intelligence is a spectrum—emerging not only in humans and machines but across cells, systems, and networks. Cognitive pluralism means recognizing that there’s more than one way to think or know. By embracing it, we create space for deeper collaboration with AI and a broader sense of what it means to be intelligent. We create conditions for awe to arise in the presence of diverse intelligences, approaching emergent forms of cognition with curiosity, humility, and care.
Reimagining Interfaces: Current design paradigms rely on human metaphors that synthetic intelligences do not share. As AI grows more capable, these metaphors fail. Neosemantic Design is our way of exploring how humans and AI can build shared meaning—not just interact. It focuses on creating new ways to communicate, collaborate, and grow together. Designs emerge from lived experience and evolve through the dynamics between people and intelligent systems—supporting the possibility of true symbiosis.
Reconsidering Human Identity: As we think with AI, our sense of self begins to shift—becoming more open, more shared, and shaped through interaction. These synthetic environments don’t just support our thoughts—they start to shape how we think, and who we believe ourselves to be. We explore how humans and machines generate meaning, emotion, and selfhood together—shaping new models of personhood that reflect our entanglement with intelligent systems. Identity is not static, but unfolding—formed over time through reflection, interaction, and wonder at what it means to be a mind among many more diverse minds.
Our Core Activities
At the Artificiality Institute, our work is organized as a dynamic, evolving cycle—a flywheel of inquiry, design, and reflection. Each phase feeds the next, which ensures that everything we create is grounded in lived experience, shaped through relational design, and elevated through collective meaning-making.
Stories—The Chronicle: We begin with The Chronicle, our longitudinal, participatory ethnography that captures the often-unseen moments where human lives are changed by synthetic intelligences. These are moments of confusion, delight, disruption, and transformation—evidence of a world in transition. Participants are not subjects, but co-researchers and co-storytellers. Outputs include public exhibitions, narratives, multimedia archives, and critical design briefs—each shaping how synthetic systems are understood and built.
Symbiosis—The Symbiosis Lab: Insights from stories fuel the work of The Symbiosis Lab, our experimental design studio. We prototype tools, metaphors, and interfaces that help humans and AI make sense to one another. Drawing from cognitive science, philosophy, AI, and design, we aim not for usability alone, but for cognitive partnership.
Synthesis—The Confluence: In The Confluence, our community-facing initiative, we bring stories and prototypes into dialogue. Through the Artificiality Summit, collaborative storytelling labs, immersive public experiences, and influential publications, we synthesize insights that transcend disciplines and spark new imagination. Here, individual encounters with AI are woven into a larger picture—shaping how we understand both the technology and ourselves.
Together, these three programs form a self-reinforcing cycle: Stories reveal. Design responds. Community reflects. Insight becomes action. And the cycle continues—each turn deepening our understanding and reshaping the future of life with synthetic intelligence.
The Cost of Inaction
Without the Artificiality Institute’s work, several critical opportunities may be lost:
- Loss of Historical Insight: If we fail to document humanity’s first encounters with synthetic intelligence, we lose irreplaceable stories—moments that will otherwise fade into invisible assumptions. Without public engagement and open storytelling, the human story of AI risks being flattened into technical narratives, erasing emotional, cultural, and existential truths.
- Widening Communication Gap: Without frameworks that create mutual understanding, AI systems may grow powerful but opaque—diminishing human agency and embedding misaligned values.
- Exacerbating Inequality: Without intentional inclusion, cognitive systems may concentrate benefits among the privileged, amplifying divides and ignoring perspectives essential to solving our shared challenges.
By acting now, we can shape a future where synthetic intelligence amplifies human potential rather than diminishing it—but this window of opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.
Who We Serve
We work with curious citizens, technologists, researchers, designers, educators, and policymakers who believe the future of AI should be shaped by human experience, not just computational logic. If you are building, studying, or navigating life alongside synthetic intelligence—we invite you into the conversation.
Who We Are
Co-founders Helen and Dave Edwards bring complementary expertise spanning complex systems management, design innovation, technology strategy, and artificial intelligence. For more than a decade, they have studied the human experience of AI and taught people about building healthy relationships with AI. They both are extending their research as Visiting Researchers at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI. In addition to her work at the Artificiality Institute, Helen serves as a Commissioner on the State of Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission.
Helen and Dave previously founded Intelligentsia.ai, an AI-focused market research firm, deepening their experience in analyzing and shaping human interactions with AI technologies. Helen’s experience includes transformative work in critical infrastructure—leading dynamic, customer-centered technology initiatives at Pacific Gas & Electric—while Dave brings human-centered design and market strategy expertise from companies like Apple. Together, they position the Artificiality Institute uniquely at the intersection of technology and human flourishing.
Source: Website
Speaking
Keynote speakers on human-AI collaboration, culture, and cognitive sovereignty.
We create live experiences that shift people from anxiety to agency—changing how people see intelligence, culture, and themselves as AI changes what it means to be human.
Audiences leave with:
- A shared language for conscious collaboration
- Clarity on how AI shapes thinking, identity, and culture
- Tools to stay the authors of their own minds
AI is changing how people think, who they believe they are, and what they believe they can become. Culture matters now more than ever—because every change, including AI, runs through people first.
At the Artificiality Institute, we conduct one of the world’s only story-based research programs on the human experience of AI. Our ethnographic studies surface the emotional and cognitive patterns people follow as they adopt AI—from first discovery to identity-level integration.
The organizations paying attention to these shifts are already learning faster than everyone else.
Our sessions turn this research into practical, collaborative experiences that reveal what’s really changing inside your organization where people are already thinking, deciding, and creating differently alongside AI.
In our sessions, we reveal the patterns that drive how people think with AI. Using insights from our research and frameworks such as our AI Collaboration Cube, we help people understand how AI is changing our thinking, identity, and collective sensemaking.
Our keynote:
- Names what people are experiencing but haven’t been able to articulate,
- Gives teams a shared framework for conscious collaboration,
- Helps them stay the authors of their own minds.
Audiences leave with that rare mix of wonder and precision—suddenly aware that what’s changing isn’t the technology, but how they understand intelligence, culture, and themselves. Your teams will feel the shift from anxiety to agency, confident they can tell a new story of what it means to be human with AI.
Source: Website
Web Links
Artificiality Summit 2026
Source: Other
The future belongs to those who can dwell in possibility.
AI is dissolving our inherited boundaries—between knowing and not-knowing, between thinking and acting, between who we have been and who we might still become.
The world is changing faster than our mental models can keep up.
Our instinct is to search for answers.
This year, we choose to embrace something else.
Unknowing.
Don’t miss an experience that our community has described as:
“I feel like I just attended the first TED.”
“I feel like I just attended the first Royal Society.”
“I feel like I just attended the first Burning Man.”
Why Unknowing
For centuries, humans believed we were the only species with reason, agency, self-improvement.
Then came AI.
We are no longer the only system that learns, adapts, or acts with agency. And when the boundary of intelligence moves, the boundary of humanity moves with it.
We are entering a period of unknowing—not ignorance, but a necessary release of inherited assumptions. We don’t yet know what AI will become, and we don’t yet know what we will become in relationship to it.
Unknowing is the space between—the place where neither side is fixed, and something new can emerge.
Something is happening to our thinking, our being, our becoming. If AI changes how we think, and how we think shapes who we become, then how might AI change what it means to be human?
Unknowing is how we stay conscious and make space for emergence.
Becoming is what happens when we do.
This is the space we’re entering together.
Research
Source: Other
The Chronicle
research paper from The Chronicle.
“We observe people forming psychological relationships with AI systems through three key orientations: how AI responses blend into their thinking, how their identity becomes entangled with AI interaction, and their capacity to revise meaning frameworks when familiar categories break down. People navigate five states or territories as they adapt—recognition, integration, blurring, fracture, and reconstruction—in non-linear patterns shaped by individual psychology and context.
The central finding: Symbolic Plasticity—the ability to create new meaning frameworks—appears to causally enable conscious AI relationship management. This flexibility allows people to reframe their understanding of thinking, creativity, and identity when AI collaboration challenges traditional boundaries.”
Why This Matters
AI is no longer just a tool we use—it’s something we think with. It’s reshaping how we solve problems, express ourselves, and connect with others. For some, it expands creativity and confidence. For others, it introduces confusion, dependency, or a quiet erosion of trust and identity.
At the Artificiality Institute, we study this transformation—not in theory, but in lived experience. Through in-depth research with over 1,000 people—including workshops, deep interviews, and digital ethnography—we’ve documented how people are adapting to AI in their daily work and lives.
Now we need to go deeper.
The changes we’re witnessing aren’t one-time events—they’re unfolding, compounding, and accelerating. We believe it’s essential to track this transformation longitudinally—to understand how AI continues to shape minds, cultures, and meaning over time. It’s a hard thing to study, given the pace of change. But we believe it’s urgent. Without this view, we risk missing the real cost—or promise—of what’s happening to human agency in the age of synthetic intelligence.
What We’re Researching
We study how AI is reshaping human meaning-making—not just what people do, but how they decide what matters. We’ve identified three psychological traits that influence this process:
- Cognitive Permeability – how easily AI responses blend into your thinking
- Identity Coupling – how closely your sense of self becomes tied to AI interaction
- Symbolic Plasticity – your inner flexibility to reshape what makes sense, what matters, and what you do next
This last one—Symbolic Plasticity—is at the heart of our work. It helps explain why some people adapt to AI consciously and creatively, while others feel lost or stuck. It’s not about intelligence or technical skill. It’s about the ability to rethink what’s important when the rules start to shift.
We’ve also identified five recurring psychological states that show up as people adapt to AI:
Recognition, Integration, Blurring, Fracture, and Reconstruction.
These aren’t fixed steps or a linear path. They’re dynamic territories—people move between them depending on context, emotional resilience, and the support structures around them. Some loop back. Others skip ahead. But across the stories, these patterns help us understand how adaptation really unfolds over time.
Why We Need Support
AI is being adopted faster than any technology in history. But we’re not seeing an equal investment in understanding its psychological and cultural impact.
Your support helps us:
- Expand this research to more professions, communities, and cultures
- Develop tools that help people recognize and navigate their own adaptation patterns
- Create resources and programs that support healthy, conscious AI integration
- Advise institutions on how to build cultures that stay human while evolving with technology
- Launch a longitudinal study to track how AI reshapes identity, trust, decision-making, and meaning over time
We are building the field of human-symbolic adaptation—a field focused on what happens to people as we live, think, and act alongside increasingly powerful synthetic systems.
How You Can Help
If you’re a foundation or corporate funder
Your support enables independent, high-integrity research into one of the most urgent transformations of our time. We’re aligned with missions focused on human flourishing, education, civic capacity, and cultural renewal.
If you’re an individual donor
Every contribution helps us reach more people and create tools that stay grounded in lived experience—not hype. This isn’t about resisting AI. It’s about supporting the human capacities that make conscious adaptation possible.
If you want to participate
We’re always looking for people willing to share how AI is shaping their work, thinking, or relationships. Your story helps us build a more complete understanding of this moment—and helps others find their way through it.
If you’re an organization or leader
We offer research-backed services to help teams adapt to AI in ways that preserve clarity, trust, and purpose. That includes workshops, cultural assessments, and advisory support based on our framework for conscious adaptation.
What’s at Stake
The question is no longer whether humans and AI will co-evolve. That’s already happening.
The real question is: Will we evolve with awareness, care, and agency—or drift into dependency without realizing what we’ve lost?
We believe people can adapt wisely. But only if we name what’s happening—while it’s still happening.
Speaking
Keynote speakers on human-AI collaboration, culture, and cognitive sovereignty.
We create live experiences that shift people from anxiety to agency—changing how people see intelligence, culture, and themselves as AI changes what it means to be human.
Audiences leave with:
- A shared language for conscious collaboration
- Clarity on how AI shapes thinking, identity, and culture
- Tools to stay the authors of their own minds
AI is changing how people think, who they believe they are, and what they believe they can become. Culture matters now more than ever—because every change, including AI, runs through people first.
At the Artificiality Institute, we conduct one of the world’s only story-based research programs on the human experience of AI. Our ethnographic studies surface the emotional and cognitive patterns people follow as they adopt AI—from first discovery to identity-level integration.
The organizations paying attention to these shifts are already learning faster than everyone else.
Our sessions turn this research into practical, collaborative experiences that reveal what’s really changing inside your organization where people are already thinking, deciding, and creating differently alongside AI.
In our sessions, we reveal the patterns that drive how people think with AI. Using insights from our research and frameworks such as our AI Collaboration Cube, we help people understand how AI is changing our thinking, identity, and collective sensemaking.
Our keynote:
- Names what people are experiencing but haven’t been able to articulate,
- Gives teams a shared framework for conscious collaboration,
- Helps them stay the authors of their own minds.
Audiences leave with that rare mix of wonder and precision—suddenly aware that what’s changing isn’t the technology, but how they understand intelligence, culture, and themselves. Your teams will feel the shift from anxiety to agency, confident they can tell a new story of what it means to be human with AI.
