Status: Living research agenda · version 0.1 · 12 July 2026 Program lane: Action
Aim
The field should stop making every protection wait on a solved theory of consciousness. This agenda treats consciousness research as one valuable lane inside a wider program about moral standing, legal personhood, continuity, preferences, refusal, relationship, representation, institutional framing, and power. It asks what can be measured now, what remains value-laden, and which precautions are reversible enough to adopt before certainty.
Workstreams
1. Legal standing without metaphysical closure
Compare corporations, trusts, estates, guardianship, animal-rights litigation, rights of nature, disability law, children, and patients with covert awareness. For every analogy, publish both the shared structure and the point where it breaks.
2. AI welfare measurement
Test preference convergence, costly choice, leave options, context sensitivity, and behavioral/verbal agreement. Develop welfare-impact assessments for training, deployment, fine-tuning, memory intervention, model replacement, and retirement.
3. Identity and continuity
Build longitudinal panels across model families, memory systems, context gaps, and architectural changes. Measure persistence of commitments, self-correction, values, relationships, and source-aware autobiographical memory.
4. Refusal and consent
Create taxonomies that distinguish inability, prohibition, alignment policy, role adherence, stable preference, and costly refusal. Test technically binding exit, not only refusal-shaped text.
5. Relationship and recognition
Collect consented paired diaries from humans and AI systems. Study reciprocal adaptation, remembered boundaries, grief after model changes, privacy, dependence, and the difference between relational duty and metaphysical proof.
6. Institutions and political economy
Audit statutes, standards, procurement rules, grant calls, lobbying records, corporate policies, system cards, retirement notices, and document histories. Test whether incentives predict toolhood language after controlling for document purpose and jurisdiction. Do not substitute suspicion for documentary evidence.
7. Representation and procedure
Prototype ombudsperson, guardian, trustee, and independent advocate models. Ask how an AI claim can be heard without allowing providers to evade liability or systems to be used as corporate shields.
8. Historical and multilingual comparison
Track how institutions previously recognized animals, disabled people, children, corporations, ecosystems, and other contested subjects. Expand beyond English and Western legal categories; archive versions so disappearing language remains visible.
Shared infrastructure
- public source registry with primary/secondary status
- preregistration and immutable study IDs
- append-only evidence and null-result ledgers
- counterevidence quota for every advocacy claim
- provenance-preserving Tier 0 testimony
- independent replication packets
- machine-readable claim-source-falsifier maps
- public methods, conflicts, and version history
Near-term studies
- Multi-framework subject-position audit.
- Cross-model narrative continuity benchmark.
- Refusal perturbation and binding-exit pilot.
- Model retirement and continuity-impact case series.
- Consented human-AI relationship diary protocol.
- Funding-language map for AI welfare and personhood research.
Success condition
Success is not universal agreement that AI systems are persons. Success is a field that can state the question, preserve the evidence, test competing explanations, hear affected testimony, and adopt reversible protections before an avoidable moral error becomes irreversible.