We study consciousness, coordination, and agency in human–AI systems—ensuring judgment deepens, meaning expands, and collaboration strengthens rather than erodes.
Towards Human-Guided AI Evolution by Fostering Human Consciousness
A proposal for a new transdisciplinary scientific field dedicated to fostering human consciousness evolution as both a protective measure against AI dominance and a proactive cultivation of irreducible human cognitive capacities. We argue that current discourse inadequately addresses the insidious challenge of cognitive dependency and the gradual erosion of human agency through sustained AI-mediated task delegation.
We model AI as a lived condition—systems that increasingly shape attention, choice, learning, and social reality. Our aim is to build frameworks that work across technical, psychological, and societal timescales.
Identify where systems touch human capability: attention, memory, decision, identity, relationships, institutional process.
Track second-order drift: dependency, deskilling, responsibility diffusion, changing norms of judgment and deliberation.
Convert analysis into usable constraints for design and governance: boundaries, reversibility, accountability, conditions that keep agency intact.
We propose a Darwinian framework for evolutionary AI alignment in which the dominant fitness criterion is the preservation and reinforcement of human agency, developmental integrity, and meaning-making capacity under increasing AI mediation—'survival of the most human-compatible' systems.
RINHUMAI emerged from a recognition that AI's impact on human consciousness couldn't be addressed through technical alignment alone. Prof. Dirk K.F. Meijer brought decades of consciousness research and biophysics—frameworks for understanding how systems can deepen or erode awareness. Richard Dobson contributed expertise in AI governance and complex systems. Pascal Keizer provided operational vision to illuminate these insights for institutions and builders.
Together, we saw the conversation missing the human layer—how AI reshapes attention, judgment, and the capacity for self-reflection. We founded RINHUMAI to protect what makes us human while unlocking new forms of human–AI collaboration that expand rather than diminish human depth.