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Announcing the “Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI” Working Group
Our new initiative to develop a foundational framework of rights and protections for the age of AI.
We recently launched the “Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI” Working Group, a new initiative convening experts across legal, technical, and philosophical disciplines to develop a foundational framework of rights and protections for the Age of AI.
As artificial intelligence systems increasingly shape how we think, work, relate, and create, we must define a set of core principles for safeguarding the human experience. The Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI Working Group will explore — and answer — a central question: What new or updated rights and legal protections are necessary to protect our humanity?
“AI poses new and novel challenges to our relationships, our cognitive abilities, our work, and even our sense of self,” our Senior Director of Strategy and Impact Camille Carlton said. “The Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI Working Group will move beyond passively admiring the AI problem to actively defining core principles for defending our humanity.”
“As important as it is to regulate this revolutionary technology, regulating companies is just one part of the equation. We must also establish the new rights necessary to protect people in an AI-driven future. This working group seeks to do exactly that.”
The Working Group is an initiative of CHT’s broader analysis examining AI and what makes us human. It will convene throughout the spring and summer of 2026 to examine AI’s impact across five core pillars of the human experience:
Relationships
Cognitive capacities
Inner world
Identities
Work and contribution
Across each of these domains, the group will define shared norms and rights — that is, the deeply, uniquely human qualities of each that must be protected against encroachment from AI. Once defined, these principles can serve as a foundation for future governance, innovation, and public understanding.
The Group’s work will culminate in a public report to be published in the summer of 2026, outlining the specific rights and protections needed to preserve human dignity and agency.
Working Group participants include:
Edward Harcourt, Oxford University Institute for Ethics in AI
Anna Su, Henry Jackman Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
“The threat AI poses to our societies and ourselves cannot be addressed from any single point of view,” Carlton said. “This working group reflects a shared commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration — and meaningful action.”
The Preserving What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI Working Group builds on momentum from the AI Roadmap, extending CHT’s policy efforts into a new phase of expert-driven development. Rather than solely diagnosing risks, the group will focus on identifying actionable frameworks that can guide policymakers, technologists, and civil society.
This seems like a panel of very expert people. But where are the experts and practitioners of The Humanities? Where the artists or the writers? No Brian Eno? No Sarah Churchwell? There is a danger that your panel will take a very scientific and legal approach to this ... which would, I fear, risk missing the very essence of "being human" which you are seeking to understand and protect.
What You’re Missing in “Preserving What Makes Us Human”
Hi CHT team,
I read your recent announcement on “Preserving What Makes Us Deeply Human in the Age of AI,” and I want to challenge something fundamental in your approach because I believe your work is important, but incomplete.
You’ve correctly identified the five pillars being eroded: relationships, cognition, inner worlds, identity, and human contribution. You’ve also correctly diagnosed the root cause: the incentive structures of AI companies optimizing for engagement, dependency, and dominance.
But your proposed path norms, protections, and public awareness does not resolve the root problem. It attempts to constrain a system whose incentives remain unchanged.
History shows us this pattern clearly. Social media wasn’t fixed through awareness. It wasn’t fixed through design guidelines. It evolved only when new systems emerged that shifted incentives entirely.
If the business model remains extraction-based, the erosion you describe is not a risk, it is an inevitability.
What’s missing in your work is a parallel focus on building alternative systems that:
- Replace engagement-driven incentives with intent-driven outcomes
- Prioritize human-to-human connection over human-to-AI substitution
- Reward meaning, not attention
- Create economic alignment where human contribution is amplified, not replaced
Without this, you are asking existing systems to act against their own survival logic.
You are diagnosing the collapse of human systems, but not yet designing the successor system.
The future will not be secured by asking current AI systems to behave differently.
It will be secured by building systems that cannot behave in harmful ways because their incentives are fundamentally different.
If your goal is to truly preserve what makes us human, the work must evolve from:
“Protecting humanity from technology”
to
“Designing systems where humanity is the product, not the input.”
I believe this is the missing layer and the only path to completing the work you’ve started.
If this resonates, I’d be open to sharing a framework for what this could look like in practice.
George L.
Founder of Conectrr