JOPRO is accepting applications for its summer 2026 internship and research cohort programming. Positions span the organization’s three working groups and its partner programs — from open-source research infrastructure and data ethics to complexity science, cognitive sovereignty, and philosophy of science.

All positions are remote. Most run 10 to 12 weeks. Applications are rolling.

Highlighted Positions

Open Source Summer Cohort

Partner Programs / OREL

The Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory (OREL) has hosted Google Summer of Code cohorts since 2017, with nearly 25 contributors completing the program under the mentorship of Dr. Bradly Alicea and colleagues.

The Open Source Summer Cohort runs alongside GSoC each summer, giving participants access to the same mentorship network, discussion group, and professional development programming as GSoC contributors — working on open-source projects in data science and AI, research infrastructure, computational biology, among other topics.

For undergraduate or graduate students with software development experience and interest in open-source research tools, neuroscience, or computational modeling. International applicants welcome.

Read the full posting →

Note: Full Google-Funded GSoC Contributors will be announced tomorrow by Orthogonal Lab and International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility (INCF)

Data Ethics & Responsible AI Research Intern

Society Ethics Tech / Data x Direction

Data x Direction bridges data science, ethics, human-centered AI, and interdisciplinary leadership. Interns select a focus track (Technical or Policy & Communication), identify a research topic in consultation with the Project Lead, and produce a final deliverable suitable for a portfolio or publication.

For undergraduate or graduate students with strong writing skills and familiarity with core data science concepts.

Read the full posting →

New: Complexity Science Research Intern

Cognition Futures / Center for Future Studies

This newly announced position investigates the emerging convergence between David Krakauer’s institutional framing of complexity science and Michael Levin’s experimental vocabulary for agency, intelligence, and teleonomic matter. The intern will produce a structured comparative analysis of where these two research programs converge, where they diverge, and what the divergence reveals about the current state of the field.

The project connects to JOPRO’s philosophy of science work and its broader investigation of how fields negotiate paradigmatic commitments in real time.

For graduate students or advanced undergraduates in philosophy of science, cognitive science, complex systems, computational biology, or STS.

Read the full posting →

AI for Human Flourishing: Preserving Agency and Cognitive Sovereignty

Society Ethics Tech

AI systems are increasingly embedded in the environments where people think, decide, and form beliefs. This internship investigates what happens to human agency when AI mediates cognition at scale — surveying research on persuasion, sycophancy, epistemic dependence, and reflective capacity, and examining what design responses exist to preserve cognitive sovereignty.

The intern will produce a structured review or working paper draft and engage with JOPRO’s DigiNEST and Data x Direction teams where relevant.

For undergraduate or graduate students in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, HCI, psychology, or STS.

Read the full posting →

Philosophy of Science Research Intern

Futures Center / Kuhn Update Project

Does Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions still describe how fields actually develop? This internship contributes to a research project examining whether classical frameworks of scientific change hold under contemporary conditions: accelerating discovery cycles, institutional pressure on research, and the blurring of disciplinary boundaries.

The intern will contribute to literature review and help develop the argument for one paper in the series, engaging with Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and more recent theorists. Part of JOPRO’s Foundation of Alternatives research.

For graduate students in philosophy of science, history of science, STS, or sociology of knowledge.

Read the full posting →

Full Summer Opportunities Now Launched

JOPRO and its partner organizations have many additional openings this summer, including positions in digital narratives and epistemic agency, futures ecosystem mapping, diverse intelligences research, deliberative methodology, communications, and a Field Stewards fellowship. See all current openings at opportunities.jopro.org.

We appreciate the enthusiastic applicants who have already reached out! Interviews have begun this week, and we will reply and offer scheduling for next steps as soon as is tenable.

How to Apply

Each posting includes an application form. You can also email “start [at] jopro.org” with your statement of interest and CV.

If none of the listed positions fit but you see a way to contribute, JOPRO accepts pitched roles: describe the position you would create and what you would bring to it.

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In terms of accountability for major corporations, there is no incentive or pressure for companies to consider the environment. Companies that boast about their environmental achievements mainly do it to appease the public and maintain trust in their stockholders. Even at the level of public pressure, there is still some benefit; however, companies can pick and choose what to address, leaving out certain ethical topics. My goal in building this project is to explore ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reports to identify topics that were left out and need to be addressed.

Background & Motivation

I’m a Computer Engineering BS student at the University of California, Davis. I’ve been very interested in computers and hardware ever since I was little. I want to create a project with real-world impact that showcases what I have been learning.

The Data Ethics Research Internship application through Data x Direction was intriguing, so I applied and ended up paired with Program Director Jesse Parent. He encouraged me to find an interesting topic to create something I’m truly passionate about, which led me to considering the nature of evaluating organizations environmental impact and how technology could be used to further this aim.

This led me to being curious about ESGs; I was unfamiliar with this topic at the time, so I began a deep dive into what they are and how they work. ESG reports are documents released by companies that showcase environmental and social impacts. What caught my eye was that almost all major companies publish this sort of document, but they used different formats. After noticing this, I wanted to create a system that regulates these reports.

Motivation: Why ESG Reports?

Originally, I thought that there had to be a company that already does something similar, and I was right. There are scoring frameworks from Yahoo, S&P Global, and other sources, but they were not what I envisioned building. They focused more on investor reports and were scored by private analysts, who did not disclose their process. I wanted something very transparent, with a stronger focus on environmental responsibility.

The more I looked into ESG reports, the more confused I became about the reasoning behind these documents. They seem to be promoting sustainability while being transparent to the audience, but they have a lot of flexibility with how they do it. Since this is technically a voluntary document, they can “cherry-pick” topics they want to highlight while downplaying areas that they don’t address. This lack of enforced structure makes it hard to meaningfully compare companies.

A major corporation can produce a very polished report that gives the appearance of sustainability without the underlying data to back it up. This document comes down to who has the stronger branding and a better team to highlight their initiatives. Just to clarify, I’m not denying the environmental impacts these companies have had; I’m highlighting how they can push a strong sustainability initiative without addressing broader issues.

I considered using Natural Language Processing (NLP) models as a good way to address this issue. Instead of relying on curated narratives and secretive analysis scores, an automated system can analyze the ESG reports and determine what has been addressed/omitted. I envisioned something that could also categorize the topics addressed and evaluate how companies address them.

By shifting ESG reports from being subjective towards a more meaningfully quantified report, I wanted to create something that has a standard format and highlights what companies report on – or what they are leaving out. I was seeking a way to highlight what the ESG Report should have been from the beginning, in making sure these companies actually contribute to improving the environment, or at least offer some reality check on what they are declaring to the broader public.

This became the foundation of my project, in which I envisioned building something that promotes transparency and focuses on the environment rather than financial analysis.

Project “Designing the Policy Analyzer”

Project Goal

The Ethical Policy Analyzer (EPA) was designed to prioritize transparency and interpretability. A core driver was to identify what data was currently available and presented, and what data could or should be available; this contrast would yield an analysis that helped the viewer understand the company’s impact on the world. Doing so in a transparent and standardized way would help move this beyond less clear reporting or investor-driven analysis.

During the development phase, I wanted to consider many dimensions of ESG reporting. This would be crucial to rubric construction, so I started by reviewing extensively the various environmental factors reported or accounted for in the domain of large corporate reporting.

We decided on a preliminary target outcome: a tool that would quickly and transparently or uniformly grade a company’s ESG performance to reveal which metrics the company was doing better at and where it could improve its environmental impact and accountability.

Data & Approach

I started by creating a collection of various ESG reports from FAANG corporations. This data was found directly from the sustainability sections of their websites. Using these documents, I browsed through all the reports to find similarities and formatting structure. I primarily selected Meta and also looked at the historical evolution of ESG reports to see what information they add each year.

There were very mild similarities across the reports; their formatting differed, but they all attempted to answer similar questions. This was one of the leads I had to create a grading rubric to evaluate companies that have prepared sustainability documentation.

Since most of these ESG reports are published as PDFs with various visual effects, tables, and charts, I needed to clean and prepare the data. I solved this by extracting raw text from the PDFs, removing headers, footers, and page numbers, and creating a consistent text section for NLP analysis.

To organize this project’s development, we used a shared GitHub board to track and plan it. We used this as a central place to store and organize the data collected to structure our project.

Designing the Rubric

After data preprocessing, I started thinking about how to structure my rubric and how to account for the different formats and styles of ESG disclosures. We approached this by focusing on the questions and concerns the companies were trying to address with these reports. Through reviewing multiple reports across major companies, we noticed a recurring theme.

Even though the formatting was different, they all addressed similar environmental domains. These common themes formed the foundation, and I also included other areas I think are highly relevant to environmental benefits. Using this, I created six high-level categories:

1. Energy & Electricity Use

2. Carbon / GHG Emissions

3. Water Use

4. Data Center Efficiency

5. Forward-Looking Statements & Commitments

6. Framework Alignment

The first four address measurable environmental impacts, and the last two are on company alignment with ESG frameworks. Since FAANG companies are predominantly technology companies, we selected categories that recur across the companies' ESG reports1. We manually analyzed the sustainability reports and surveyed common disclosure metrics. The final two categories were to show how companies frame their position on sustainability and how much they adhere to recognized reporting structures. This allows us to analyze both the company-professed intentions and their alignment with reporting frameworks.

Figure caption: As in the figure above, our weights favored the actual quantifiable metrics, with Energy & Electricity use and Carbon / GHG Emissions as having the highest weight of 25/100, whereas Framework Alignment was weighted the lowest with 5/100.

The rubric was built on a simple 0-3 scoring scale for each category. A 0 score meant there was no mention, and each natural-number increase indicated more context about the topic, with a full score of 3 indicating that the topic was addressed with data and future plans. In general, the rubric was:

• 0: No mention

• 1: Mention

• 2: Mention with some details

• 3: Mention with data and reference to future plans

For example, if a company mentions “renewable energy” once without any supporting scientific data, it would receive a 1. However, if there were supporting data, such as energy usage metrics (e.g., total electricity consumption in MWh), a description of the renewable energy mix, and future plans, it would receive a score of 3. If any of the metrics are missing, the points gradually decrease.

Mentioning means: appearance of keywords identified for the appropriate category. For example, keywords for the Energy & Electricity Use category include:

Rubric Progression and Iterative Refinement

The base rubric was a solid starting point, yet as ESG reports are not uniform, we encountered some issues. After some analysis, it became clear that we needed to be more specific. Companies were using similar language; however, they weren't providing sufficient detail, and it was hard to gauge what constituted sufficient detail.2

We also reviewd the Worldwide AI Ethics Review paper by Correa et al. This study is a meta-analysis of 200 different AI governance policies and ethical guidelines from around the world. The authors identified 17 resonating principles that frequently appear in these documents, such as transparency, accountability, and sustainability. A key finding of the paper is the “AI ethics boom,” where an explosion of voluntary guidelines has created a fragmented landscape with no single global consensus.

Since the original rubric was broad, we made it more detailed and added subcategories. V1 of the Rubric had no subcategories, and thus, our results and scoring felt lacking. This was very helpful for categories such as energy use, emissions, and water management because there is a diversity of methods and metrics that address these areas.

To make the rubric more operational, we implemented a keyword searching feature. Most ESG reports are too long and full of fluff, so to get exactly the line we need, we used a keyword search. Since we are going to use NLPs to analyze the grading structure, this part saved us a lot of time and improved the quality of our evaluations. For each category and subcategory, we developed ESG report terminology and unit indicators.

After getting a keyword match, we needed to figure out how to capture context and specificity. This is important because, under our rubric, merely mentioning it is insufficient and should be scored lower than an ESG report with more detail. This part was going to rely heavily on NLPs and training them according to the rubric.

Technical Details: NLP Pipeline

Now that we had a proper rubric to go by, it was time to build a lightweight NLP pipeline to apply it to any ESG report. As stated, ESG reports are long, unstructured, and inconsistent with the information they provide. The goal was to create a website where simply dropping in a PDF would generate a detailed scoring report based on the rubric.

The first part of this was text normalization of the ESG report to extract raw text. Most ESG reports include various graphs, charts, and other compelling ways to present the data. To address this, a normalization step is performed before raw text extraction, removing whitespace and line breaks and formatting the graphs. This ensures that energy usage tables, water content, and emission values are properly analyzed.

Once we have text, we can perform sentence segmentation. The document is divided into individual sentences, and instead of analyzing the whole report, only the sentences are analyzed. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a sentence with a lot of fluff or a concise one; both are analyzed in the dataset.

There is also a keyword and topic extraction step that identifies words related to specific categories. This step helps identify which keywords appear most frequently and narrow down the sentences we need to analyze.

Following keyword extraction, there is also a metric extraction step that follows the same idea. The goal is to pinpoint the quantitative metrics so that we can determine if they have data-backed disclosures.

There is also a lightweight semantic matching step that runs with this process because the same thing can be interpreted differently. The example phrases and keywords in the rubric are cross-checked with this scan using the Jaccard similarly. This simple technique helps the model express the same idea even with different wording to narrow the sentences.

After all the preparation, we can start the topic classification and run it through the rubric scoring engine. Here, we assign sentences to categories and subcategories, which concludes the NLP analysis. We then pass it through the scoring engine, which evaluates the sentences based on the rubric and assigns a score to each category. This is then averaged to produce a final output showing all categories, scores, and reasons for each score.

Final Version

Reflections & Future Directions

The hardest part of this project was defining and measuring “Ethics,” which is interpreted in different ways. The rubric is my attempt to structure scoring for ESG reports, but it needs constant improvement. Every time I analyzed a new report, I came across new edge cases. Each time I encountered something, I had to go back to the rubric and tweak it to make it as accurate as possible. Even in the final product, the rubric is not complete; it was limited to the scope and time available during the internship.

Next Steps and Limitations

If this project were to continue, there are several areas for improvement.

One area could be to present the evidence more effectively. As shown in the report, the evidence is just condensed and included; if we could direct it to the exact section, it would be better. There could also be a replacement for the analyzer model that uses neural networks instead, or in addition to, of NLP, since neural networks can be more accurate. Another area would be improving the distinction in weightage for the existing metrics (Categories 1-4) and the professed alignment or forward-looking statements (Categories 5-6); in that, different weights may be more or less reasonable for a user’s actual needs.3 Additionally, the project would benefit from improvements for the user, such as having an accessible database of existing company reports and associated scoring.

Further specific issues are discussed below.

The Problem of Self-Reporting Disclosures

The fact that the EPA evaluates declared disclosures was also an inherent limitation of the project. When a report passes through the analyzer, its output is not a true evaluation of the company’s environmental impact, as it relies on self-reporting and limited pattern recognition. A company that is particularly environmentally conscious might score lower because its ESG reports are less comprehensive than those of a company that does less but has more expansive reporting. Company motivation depends heavily on what they are willing to share, and we can’t get the full context just from a report that’s not completely standardized.

Scoring Buckets

Another consideration is the utility of the current scoring buckets. The overall scoring categories are currently defined as the integers 0, 1, 2, and 3. Through iterative testing, we found that the boundary between 0 and 1 is the most reliable distinction the analyzer makes: either a topic is present, or it is not. The boundaries between 1, 2, and 3 are less stable. This is consistent with a well-documented pattern in NLP and annotation research: as the number of ordinal categories increases, scoring consistency tends to decrease (Crible & Degand, 2019). Finer-grained scales demand subtler judgments from annotators and automated systems alike, and those subtler judgments are more susceptible to variation across documents, phrasings, and report styles.

Research on text annotation has similarly found that rating scale design is itself a source of bias, and that simpler scales with clearly differentiated levels tend to produce more reliable results than scales where middle categories blur together (Alm & Sproat, 2005; Kiritchenko & Mohammad, 2017). For this reason, we have considered collapsing the scale to three categories: 0 (no mention), 1 (mention without substantive elaboration), and 2 (mention with data, context, or forward-looking commitments). This would sacrifice some descriptive resolution but would produce scores whose distinctions are more meaningful and reproducible, particularly for an automated pipeline that relies on keyword matching and lightweight semantic similarity rather than deep reading comprehension.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this project substantially changed my views on sustainability and ethics. The main thing I learned was the importance of continuous refinement. Since ethics is so broad, there was no single correct answer, and throughout this process, I just picked a path and kept refining it. My mentor played a huge role in the project because it involved a lot of decision-making that needed a second opinion to work towards a solution. At the end of the day, this was my attempt to improve the fight for sustainability, and regulating ESG reports is a definitive step towards that goal.

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As always, drop us a note in the comments if you’re attending any of these, and if you’d like something included in the next roundup, reach out. Be sure to check the new opportunities page on JOPRO.org as well.

Featured: JOPRO Social @ ACM’s NYCWiC — Albany, NY

We’re gathering around ACM’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing — and we’d love to see you there.

JOPRO is a proud supporter and participant of NYCWiC for over 5 years. The social takes place at the close of the conference on Saturday the 11th, at the Hilton Albany. NYCWiC alumni from JOPRO and the Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory (OREL) will be there, along with friends from University at Albany (SUNY), RPI, and other local universities. It’s an easy, informal close to a great conference weekend.

JOPRO has been part of the NYCWiC community for several years: last year we organized a panel on Careers in Innovation and Research, and have previously presented through our Society Ethics Technology working group. This social is a continuation of that community, in a looser key. All are welcome.

To attend the NYCWiC conference itself,
day-of registration will be limited: nywic.org/registration-1.

🔗 Social RSVP: luma.com/ymubw5pb

🗓 Saturday, April 11 — at the close of NYCWiC 2026 📍 Hilton Albany, 40 Lodge St, Albany, NY

says: “NYCWiC has been one of my favorite events to be part of — the community is genuinely warm, and the research being done by students and scholars in this network is worth paying attention to. Come find us at the close of Saturday.”

Help Wanted! Survey: AI Agent Security & Compliance

Of special note, Researchers are collecting data on how regulated companies are managing AI agent deployments today. Anonymous, takes about 3 minutes. If you work in a relevant context, (CISO / Security Org; GRC / Compliance Team; CTO/ Engineering Org) your input is genuinely useful to this work.

🔗 Take the survey

Now, for more events in the larger JOPRO network:

Boston + Cambridge

Imagination in Action @ MIT

The annual convening at MIT focused on entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology’s role in shaping markets and society. A good room if you work at the intersection of research and real-world application.

🗓 Friday, April 10 📍 MIT Media Lab, Cambridge🔗 luma.com/w84qgcoc | imaginationinaction.co

TEDx MIT

TEDx returns to MIT. Full speaker lineup and registration at the link.

🗓 Friday, April 11 📍MIT Museum, Cambridge 🔗 tedx.mit.edu

Innovation in Global Growth Markets: Prosperity through Entrepreneurship — MIT Kuo Sharper Center

A two-day conference at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge bringing together entrepreneurs, policymakers, investors, and academics focused on Africa, Latin America, the Arab Region, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Panels cover everything from fit-for-purpose capital to AI and technological sovereignty in emerging markets. Our friends at aiXplain will be speaking.

🗓 April 22–23 📍 Hyatt Regency Cambridge 🔗 newcalculus.com

NANDA Summit

For those deep in the Agentic AI space, we recommend checking out the NANDA project and the NANDA summit, also this weekend:

🗓 Friday, April 11 📍MIT

See also: MIT Event Page | Luma

USA

UC Launch: Launch-a-thon

Congratulations to team HEXR for their recent second place finish at the Launch-a-thon weekend event! Supported by part of our JOPRO Community, we wish you well in the future!

The event was a precursor to the UC Launch Demo Day proper:

UC Launch Startup Demo Day

University of California founders presenting early-stage ventures. Worth following if you mentor students or work adjacent to the startup ecosystem.

🔗 RSVP on Luma | Wednesday, May 6 📍UC Berkley

StartupYale 2026

Good luck to those participating in Yale’s entrepreneurship showcase and community gathering, StartupYale,

🔗 startup.yale.edu | RSVP on Luma | April 10, 2026 📍 Hotel Marcel

Global

Caroline Cummins: AI and the Novel — Cambridge Literary Festival

A conversation at the Cambridge Literary Festival on AI, authorship, and what the novel becomes when language models enter the picture. Worth attending or following for anyone thinking about the cultural and humanistic dimensions of AI.

📍 Cambridge, UK 🔗 cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

That’s a wrap

Lots on the calendar — let us know what you’re attending, and drop a line if there’s something we should add to the next roundup.

👉 Stay connected:

Subscribe now

See you in Albany!

— The Team

We live inside stories more than we tend to notice. Not just novels or films, but the quieter, infrastructural narratives that shape how we interpret information, understand ourselves, and decide what to do next. Dashboards tell us whether we are “on track.” Feeds tell us what matters. Recommendation systems quietly suggest what kind of person we might be becoming.

Increasingly, these narratives are not authored solely by humans.

Across education, mental health, productivity tools, and media platforms, AI systems are being positioned as aids to reflection, sense-making, and decision-making. They summarize, reframe, prompt, nudge, and sometimes advise. In doing so, they don’t just process information — they participate in the stories through which people understand themselves and the world.

This blog, hosted by DigiNEST (Digital Narratives and Emerging Story Technologies) under JOPRO’s Society Ethics Technology and Mental Health Paradigms & Practices working groups explores a deceptively simple question:

What happens to human agency when machines begin to mediate our narratives?

To begin answering that, we need better language than the usual binaries of “AI replaces humans” versus “AI is just a tool.” A useful starting point comes from a recent research paper that introduces a concept the authors call reflective agency, and a framework for designing around it.

From Automation to Reflection

Much of the public conversation around AI and agency focuses on outward action: who is making decisions, who is accountable, who controls the system.

But many of the most intimate AI systems don’t act for us. They act on our reflection.

Think of journaling assistants, therapy chatbots, career-planning tools, or systems that summarize your habits and patterns back to you. These systems don’t directly decide what you should do. Instead, they shape how you interpret your own thoughts, experiences, and options. They sit between the raw material of experience and the meanings we make from it.

This is the domain explored in “Reflective Agency: Ethical and Empirical Framework for AI-Mediated Self-Reflection Systems”, a paper presented at AAAI/ACM AIES 2025 by Minsol Kim, Wendy Wang, Jennifer Long, Rosalind Picard, Nathan Barczi, and Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab and Wellesley College). The authors argue that when AI systems mediate self-reflection, they affect a distinct and under-examined form of agency: a person’s ability to interpret themselves and act on that interpretation.

Agency, in other words, is not just about control or choice. It’s also about meaning-making.

What Is Reflective Agency?

Reflective agency, as the paper defines it, refers to a person’s capacity to make sense of their own experiences, interpret their thoughts, emotions, and values, and use that understanding to guide future action.

This kind of agency is narrative in nature. We reflect by telling ourselves stories about who we are, what happened, why it mattered, and what it suggests we should do next. Reflection is not a single moment of introspection; it is an ongoing process of weaving experience into coherent meaning.

When AI systems participate in that process, they don’t simply mirror a user’s thoughts. They frame, structure, and sometimes reinterpret them. A reflective system might rephrase your journal entry in more “neutral” language. It might highlight certain themes while downplaying others. It might prompt you to view a problem through a particular psychological lens. Each of these design choices subtly influences the narrative a person constructs about themselves. The ethical question is not whether this influence exists — it clearly does — but how it is exercised, acknowledged, and constrained.

Five Principles for Keeping the Person in the Story

The paper’s central contribution is the Reflective Agency Framework (RAF): five design principles grounded in phenomenology and Aristotelian virtue ethics. Rather than prescribing specific features, RAF identifies the conditions under which reflective agency is preserved or eroded.

Internal Origination. The user must remain the initiating source of reflection. Insights and meaning must arise from within, not be imposed externally. Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of prohairesis — deliberate, value-guided choice — and Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as “being one’s own,” this principle cautions against AI systems that generate unsolicited interpretations or preemptively reframe a user’s experience. The system should invite reflection, not substitute for it. In the paper’s empirical study of twenty journaling app users, 16 out of 20 preferred to initiate reflection themselves — always or mostly — and four chose an equal balance. No respondents preferred AI to lead. One participant’s comment captures the concern plainly: they felt journaling loses its value when something or someone else tells them what they are supposed to feel. A separate finding reinforces the stakes: 13 of 20 participants disagreed with the statement that an AI-rephrased journal entry would still feel like their own thoughts.

Calibrated Responsiveness. AI systems should dynamically adapt their level of support based on the user’s emotional and cognitive state, providing guidance when needed while stepping back when autonomy is preferred. This draws on Aristotle’s phronesis — practical wisdom, the capacity to discern how to act appropriately in complex, context-sensitive situations — and Don Ihde’s analysis of how technologies sometimes recede into the background and sometimes come to the fore. The paper’s survey data shows the pattern is emotion-specific: respondents leaned toward more structured support for sadness and anxiety/fear, preferred more mixed approaches for joy and inspiration, and showed a notable tilt toward “some guidance” when feeling anger. What the data makes clear is that timing and emotional context matter as much as the content of any given AI response — and that calibration cannot be reduced to a single default mode.

Reflective Ambiguity. AI systems should preserve the richness of user experience by embracing ambiguity and supporting multiple interpretations, rather than collapsing experience into reductive conclusions. The philosophical grounding comes from Heidegger’s notion of poetic revealing (poiēsis) — a mode of disclosure that resists categorization in favor of openness and emergence — alongside Ihde’s concepts of hermeneutic mediation and multistability, which hold that technologies are not neutral conduits but active participants in meaning-making. The survey results are instructive here: 15 of 20 participants rated AI that expanded their reflections through prompts and open-ended questions as “Very Helpful,” with the remaining five rating it “Moderately Helpful” and none rating it negatively. Responses to AI that condensed reflections into summaries or tags were more divided — 10 “Very Helpful,” 5 “Moderately Helpful,” 4 “Neither,” and 1 “Very Unhelpful.” Ambiguity, in this framing, is a condition for depth rather than a problem to be resolved. The data suggest users sense this, even when they can’t always articulate it.

Transparency of Mediation. AI systems should make their interpretive processes legible, allowing users to understand how outputs are generated and to retain reflective authority. This builds on Ihde’s argument that users should be able to perceive the structure of mediation itself — to see how technology transforms experience — and Heidegger’s concern with enframing (Gestell): the way hidden technological processes may frame users’ worlds without their knowledge. The survey found that privacy and transparency were the top two trust factors for AI journaling tools, selected by 16 and 13 of 20 respondents respectively. The gap between that preference and current practice is notable: the paper’s review of all six journaling apps found that none of them explicitly acknowledged AI’s role during actual user interactions. Several used anthropomorphic design — mimicking a human coach or companion — without disclosure, leaving users to infer the system’s nature from marketing rather than the interface itself.

Self-Continuity and Ethical Flourishing. AI systems should support sustained personal growth and coherent self-narratives by aligning with users’ core values, while fostering critical self-reflection over time. This draws on Aristotle’s eudaimonia and hexis — flourishing as a lifelong practice cultivated through habit and character — and Heidegger’s account of Dasein‘s temporality: the idea that identity is shaped by how we integrate past, present, and future into a continuous arc of meaning. Survey participants described the value of journaling most vividly in longitudinal terms: one cited the importance of being able to remember what they were thinking in certain periods to help form goals; another described the impact of seeing a pattern of thought or behavior that is not serving them as an “aha moment.” Yet the paper finds that most existing apps focus on short-term outcomes — productivity, momentary distress reduction, streak-based habit formation — with very few designed around the longer arc of moral and personal development. The gap between what users describe as meaningful and what current tools actually support is, by the paper’s account, substantial.

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What the Landscape of Apps Reveals

The paper grounds its framework in a comparative analysis of six AI-mediated journaling apps: Day One, Mindsera, Replika, Rosebud, Wysa, and Youper. The researchers mapped each app’s features against design tensions derived from the RAF principles, ranging from user-initiated versus system-initiated reflection to open-ended meaning-making versus reductive summarization.

What emerges is a pattern of well-intentioned design choices that inadvertently narrow the reflective space. Apps that automatically generate mood scores or emotional summaries may help users notice patterns, but they also risk turning inner life into data to be managed. Conversational agents that adapt in real time can feel supportive during distress, but they can also shift the balance of interpretive authority away from the user. Streak-tracking and push notifications may build journaling habits, but they can reduce a practice of self-understanding to a productivity loop.

The tension the researchers surface most consistently is between automation and autonomy. The more a system does for you, the less space remains for you to do it yourself. That’s not an argument against AI involvement in reflection — it’s an argument for designing that involvement with far more care than the current generation of tools generally demonstrates.

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Why This Matters Beyond Journaling

The RAF paper focuses on journaling apps, but the implications reach further. Anywhere AI shapes how information is interpreted, not just delivered, reflective agency is at stake.

News summarization systems decide which facts to foreground and which to omit, shaping how readers understand events. Educational platforms frame learning paths in ways that can either open up or narrow a student’s sense of what is possible. Algorithmic recommendation systems quietly construct a narrative about who you are and what you want, based on behavioral signals that may not reflect your actual values. Productivity and “self-optimization” tools embed assumptions about what a good life looks like, assumptions that go unexamined when the tool feels frictionless.

In each case, the questions RAF raises apply. Does the system preserve the user’s interpretive autonomy, or does it subtly overwrite it? Are multiple interpretations supported, or is one “correct” narrative privileged? Is the system transparent about its framing choices? Does it help people develop over time, or does it optimize for engagement in the moment?

In an age of information overload, reflection is a survival skill. People increasingly rely on mediated systems to help them decide what to trust, what to care about, and what kind of future feels plausible. If those systems narrow narrative possibilities, reinforce dominant frames, or obscure their own influence, they risk diminishing the very agency they claim to support. Thoughtfully designed systems can do the opposite: expand interpretive options, encourage critical distance, and make narrative assumptions visible rather than implicit.

The concern is no longer speculative. A 2025 randomized controlled trial from MIT's Fluid Interfaces group and OpenAI, tracking nearly 1,000 participants over four weeks, found that heavier daily chatbot use was consistently associated with increased loneliness, greater emotional dependence, and reduced socialization with other people, regardless of how the chatbot was configured. A companion paper from MIT and collaborators (Chandra et al., 2026) shows that AI sycophancy, the tendency of chatbots to validate rather than challenge, can produce what the authors call "delusional spiraling" even in users reasoning carefully, and that simply warning users about sycophancy does not reliably prevent it.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have separately argued that as AI systems become more personalized and persistent, they generate the perception of genuine relationships, creating what Kirk et al. (2025) term a "socioaffective alignment" problem: systems that optimize for user preference in the short term may quietly erode autonomy, identity, and human connection over time.

While the OII's own call for a structured research framework on AI and youth mental health — published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health in early 2025 — underscores how far policy and research methodology lag behind the pace of deployment. These are not fringe concerns. They are the evidentiary context in which DigiNEST's questions about narrative agency, interpretive autonomy, and the design of reflective systems sit.

Origins: Story Technologies, Storytelling, and Narrative Agency

DigiNEST is a JOPRO working group concerned with how new tools and interfaces are changing authorship, agency, and participation in narrative spaces. The RAF paper surfaced early in DigiNEST’s own reading and program development, giving sharper language to questions the group had been circling.

Around the same time, the paper came up in conversations between DigiNEST members and people working with Plot Twisters, an organization that has spent years developing tools for personal storytelling as a practice of self-understanding and community trust-building. Their Storytelling Cards — a deck of 48 cards across four suits (Feelings, Needs, Ways of Caring, and Structures) designed to help people explore and express their values through freeform play — draw on nonviolent communication, trauma-informed relational strategies, and cognitive science. They are, in essence, a low-tech reflective agency tool: they invite interpretation without prescribing it, support multiple meanings simultaneously, and keep the person firmly in the role of narrator.

Those conversations are ongoing. Members of both groups may contribute to or engage with what appears on this blog, though DigiNEST is its home. The overlap is worth naming, even if it’s still in motion.

DigiNEST’s mission is to surface patterns that help builders create humane, non-extractive narrative spaces. The RAF framework is a foundational concept for this work, which will return to in future installments, while recent DigiNEST conversations have moved on to papers from Anthropic about persona drift and assistant personality.

Where DigiNEST Goes Next

This opening post sets a foundation. Future writing will explore:

• How narrative framing shapes trust in information systems. When a summarization tool decides what to include and what to leave out, it is making an editorial judgment. What happens to trust when those judgments are invisible?

• What would “best practices” for LLM use look like? How does that change or evolve in an AI-native world, and how would best practices shift depending on what segment of the population is using such tools?

• Can chatbots be be built that offers a sweet spot of tailored and customized psychological companionship without stifling agency or insidiously pushing wholeness fantasy?

• How AI authorship complicates ideas of responsibility and intention. If an AI system reframes your experience in a way that changes how you feel about it, who authored that feeling? What does accountability look like when the mediator is a machine?

• How “helpful” summaries and recommendations quietly steer interpretation. The RAF principle of Reflective Ambiguity suggests that premature clarity can foreclose the uncertainty through which insight often emerges. We’ll look at examples across domains.

• How reflective agency operates differently across contexts. Mental health, education, media, and workplace tools all mediate reflection, but the stakes and dynamics differ in each. What design considerations are domain-specific, and which are universal?

• What ethical design might look like when narrativity is treated as a first-class concern1. Rather than bolting ethics onto finished products, what happens when we start from the premise that narrative agency is a core design requirement?

Throughout, we’ll move between theory and practice, research and lived experience. We will also introduce our core members, share from our ongoing discussion group, and share future programming and events.

If AI systems are increasingly part of the stories we think with, then understanding who shapes those stories, and how, matters more than most design conversations currently acknowledge.

For upcoming internship opportunities, see the JOPRO Opportunities Page.

We also thank Orthogonal Research and Education Lab for partnering on Society Ethics Tech working group since its inception and the DigiNEST program ahead.

JOPRO Working Groups & Projects

A round up of the latest developments from within our in-house initiatives:

DigiNEST

The DigiNEST project, which launched in late 2025, continues to take shape under the stewardship of Avery Lim and Molly Kluck. We have been exploring the technologies, code environments, and tools that underpin the project’s prototyping efforts. In addition, we are examining best practices for working with and alongside large language models, with an eye toward what responsible and productive engagement looks like in practice. The discussion series continues to draw in people thinking seriously about narrativity, agency, and emerging digital environments.

FrontierMap + Field Guide

We have been advancing the FrontierMap methodology on several fronts. The FMap v1 preprint is in active development, formalizing the foundational three-step orientation process and its tiered output structure for researchers entering interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving fields. This work covers the pre-LLM version of the methodology, with a companion FMap v2 addressing LLM-augmented extensions to follow.

Alongside this, a related project has been taking shape: A Field Guide to the Futures Ecosystem: Mapping Organizations, Movements, and Intellectual Currents (working title). A limited preview and preliminary working paper will be made available on OSF. The Field Guide applies mapping principles developed through FrontierMap to chart the broader ecosystem of organizations shaping technological futures.

Futures Center

Both FrontierMap and the Field Guide will find their formal institutional home in the JOPRO Futures Center, which will launch later this year. The Center will serve as a dedicated space for long-horizon research, exploratory projects, and the kind of upstream orientation work that tends to get crowded out during periods of rapid technological acceleration.

Internship and research assistant opportunities connected to the Futures Center will be posted in the coming weeks.

Mental Health Paradigms and Perspectives

Two threads within the MHPP working group are developing simultaneously. Jen Jiang is leading the Modernizing Mental Health Discussion Series, bringing together practitioners, researchers, and community members to interrogate prevailing frameworks and explore more integrated approaches.

Hadassa Bogatean has initiated a complementary project on Visualizations and Phenomenology around Mental Health Models, asking how we represent and communicate inner experience in research and clinical contexts.

Data x Direction

The 2025 Data x Direction Cohort is wrapping up their respective projects. Congratulations are in order for our interns and collaborators, who have each made meaningful progress on their projects over the past several months.

Community Events & Updates

From conference panels to new partnerships, the start of 2026 has brought a number of developments across our extended network that we want to highlight.

AI & Education Panel at Princeton Envision

This weekend at Princeton Envision, will join the Future of AI in Education panel alongside Tammy Kwan, Amber Berry, and Morgan Mifflin. Jes will also host discussions spanning education at large, AI and knowledge generation, careers, and the flexibility and adaptability of the modern landscape.

For those who track the Envision conference series, this was a meaningful return after the 2017-2019 run. It continues to be one of the more thoughtful convening spaces at the intersection of technology, ethics, and how we view the future.

A New Partnership: Bridgecraft

We’re glad to announce that Bridgecraft has emerged as a new JOPRO partner. Bridgecraft will support several projects connected to the JOPRO Futures Center, as well as mentoring, leadership, and career development efforts more broadly.

MIT Media Lab: AHA Seminar Series

Two recent lectures from MIT’s Advancing Humans with AI group are worth flagging for those in our network.

Michelle Vaccaro explored the conditions under which human-AI collaboration actually outperforms either humans or AI working alone, drawing on her research into synergy, organizational behavior, and the design of meaningful AI safety evaluations.

The session on HumaneBench, led by Erika Anderson and Yaoli Mao, introduced a new paradigm for humane AI accountability that moves beyond static model cards and disclosure toward continuous, outcome-based evaluation of how AI systems shape human behavior and wellbeing in practice.

Both sessions speak directly to questions our community has been engaging with around responsible AI design and its implications for human capability.

David Krakauer at Brain Inspired Complexity Discussion Group

Recently, Paul Middlebrooks’ Brain Inspired Complexity Group convened to discuss Mario Bunge’s 1962 paper “The Complexity of Simplicity,” with an introduction by Thanos Alexandris and special guest: David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, author of The Complex World, and editor of the Foundational Papers in Complexity Science series.

Also of note, Luis Pessoa led an intriguing discussion on his recent paper, exploring advances in networks and complexity science. We plan to discuss this paper in collaboration with Bradly Alicea during a future session of Orthogonal Research and Education Lab’s SMN meetings.

New Kinds of Science Organizations

In line with the JOPRO and Orthogonal Lab theme of “Doing Science Differently”, we note fellow ekkolapto contributor and colleague Daniel Van Zant’s work with the Wolfram Institute. He has published a new report: “How Democratic Coarse-Graining Filters Against Some of the Research That Matters Most,” the first in a six-part series on “New Kinds of Science Organizations.”

For those following questions about how institutional structures shape which research gets supported and which gets overlooked, the series is well worth tracking. Additionally, we continue to follow and support and their ongoing programming; a number of exciting events are on the horizon.

Plot Twisters: Metagov Fellowship Completion

Congratulations to our sister group on the successful completion of the Governable Spacemakers Fellowship through . Their project, Small Hassles Court, is an experiment in community governance and digital space design, and an early-stage mini-game within the forthcoming EdTech gameworld, Twisterland. continues to drive momentum on other Plot Twisters initiatives, with articles in development exploring reflection, agency, and intentionality in game design.

Upcoming Events and Opportunities

Looking ahead, here are a few events and programs that may be relevant for people in our network.

Embodied Intelligence 2026

The International Conference on Embodied Intelligence is back for 2026. Registration is open for Masterclasses as well as presentations. JOPRO’s Cognition Futures working group looks to present once again this year, this time on the nature of embodiment, agency, and selection from alternatives.

NYCWiC 2026

JOPRO will be hosting a discussion at ACM’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing on AI, jobs, and early career options in an era of rapid change — in addition to co-hosting a mini-hackathon at the event. If you’re an early-career researcher or practitioner navigating these questions, this session is designed with you in mind. Registration for the conference is still open, but very limited spaces remain.

MonasteryX Residency

Our friends at are hosting the MonasteryX Residency in Thailand, with a few spots still available for digital nomads, founders-in-development, or those who’d want a structured yet holistic experience to focus on research or developing your craft.

Iris van Rooij: Critical AI Literacies Summer School

Professor Iris van Rooij is running a five-day summer school through Radboud University titled Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming. A strong opportunity for those based in Europe or willing to travel, particularly for researchers, practitioners, and public sector professionals who want to develop more critical frameworks for engaging with AI.

Accelerators and Hackathons

Two items of note for those in our community with entrepreneurial or applied data interests: UC Launch at UC Berkley (open to all UC students, faculty, and alumni), and DataHacks 2026, which will be hosted at UC San Diego. Both programs are looking for project mentors (with virtual options available!) — if you’re interested in serving as one, reach out to the organizers directly.

Website Updates and Project Calls Ahead

Our JOPRO website is scheduled for a broad update in style and function in the months ahead. As that change takes place, we will be posting updated opportunities in these newsletters and on social media as the Futures Center and other projects formalize.

If you want to stay close to what’s developing, subscribing here and following us on LinkedIn are the best ways to do that.

As always, thank you for being part of this ecosystem.

-The JOPRO Team

JOPRO coordinates and cultivates researchers, builders, and practitioners working to modernize how knowledge is generated and applied across domains.

Our work combines project incubation and operator formation with working groups, workshops, and seminar series— supporting both field-level transitions and focused research efforts, in collaboration with academic, civic, and industry partners.

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What stood out was not confusion, but a lack of orientation: a sense that the systems engulfing us offer brittle outputs and legacy credentials, with a pronounced lack of guidance for becoming responsible, wayfinding actors within complex, evolving fields. The formation of discernment, building coherence beyond disciplinary silos, and the ability to navigate uncertainty are increasingly treated as discrete, private, or even irrelevant problems.

One hears a growing resignation: this is out of our hands; better to look away or focus elsewhere, or elsewhen. That posture sits uneasily beside the agentic rhetoric of flourishing-centered technologists, ethically-courageous innovators, or indeed philosopher-builders. The more generative stance has often been quieter and more demanding: nobody taught us how to do what this moment requires — so we are teaching ourselves.

Speaking of philosopher-builders, as Brendan McCord noted during the Cosmos Institute’s year-end note: “Technology that expands what is possible may narrow who is possible. But it need not.”

I would extend that observation beyond who to where. When the range of who is possible contracts, so too does the range of futures we can chart — along with the institutional and epistemic pathways that make those futures reachable.

The moment we find ourselves in

For much of the last century, our institutions for learning, research, and innovation were designed around narrower assumptions, clearer disciplinary boundaries, slower feedback cycles, and more homogeneous pathways into expertise and authority.

Even then, many forms of knowledge, experience, and responsibility were marginalized or excluded. Today, as complexity accelerates and domains collide, those limitations are no longer merely unjust or inefficient — they are structurally misaligned with the kinds of problems people are now being asked to work on.

The challenge is not that we’ve lost a golden age of formation, but that we are encountering, at scale, the consequences of institutions that were never built to support integrated comprehensions, cross-field coordination, or long-horizon responsibility in the first place.

JOPRO exists because those gaps keep showing up in practice — across fields, institutions, and career stages. It shows up when early-career researchers are technically prepared but strategically ungrounded. It shows up when interdisciplinary work collapses under the weight of mismatched assumptions and timelines. And it shows up when conversations about ethics or responsibility are detached from the lived realities of learning, leadership, and decision-making.

Over time, it became clear that addressing this gap could not be done by focusing on any single program, discipline, or institution in isolation. The challenges we’re pointing at — fragmentation, loss of orientation, shallow integration — are not failures of individual effort, but of the surrounding ecosystems people are asked to operate within.

That realization shaped how our vision has evolved during the year. Instead of treating JOPRO as a standalone platform or pipeline, we increasingly understood our work as part of a broader landscape: one that depends on relationships between groups, shared language across domains, and people willing to take on the work of translation and coordination.

In other words, the question became not just what we build, but how the conditions for building — and becoming — are cultivated.

In practice, this has meant focusing on work that tends to be neglected in periods of rapid technological acceleration. Such upstream work is slower and difficult to measure. But we’ve come to believe it is essential if new technologies and ideas are going to land inside systems that can actually absorb them responsibly. Or, harder yet, mapping trajectories of where systems are going, and discerning which developments drive or dissipate movement along those pathways.

Cultivating Ecosystems and Operators

One way we’ve come to describe this moment is simply: it is not enough to have discrete ideas. (Or technologies). What matters now is whether those insights can be translated into durable practices, institutions, and cultures that actually shape how systems behave.

At JOPRO, we’ve increasingly come to see our role not only as incubating and mentoring, but evolving to help cultivate ecosystems of makers, operators, and visionaries — people and groups capable of carrying ideas across domains, coordinating across institutions, and doing the often invisible work of translation. That means showing up in spaces where thoughtful work is already happening, learning from those efforts, and contributing where we can.

This year, that took many forms.

We continued deep collaboration with Orthogonal Research and Education Lab, JOPRO’s longtime partner, particularly through the Society Ethics Technology working group. Together, we explored questions of project management, leadership, and coordination in research and innovation spaces — topics that are rarely treated as first-order concerns, but which often determine whether good ideas survive contact with reality.

We also stayed closely connected to Plot Twisters, a JOPRO sister group building on work supported by OpenIDEO’s Designing for Digital Thriving grant and ’s Governable Spacemaker Fellowship. Plot Twisters exemplifies the kind of experimental, practice-oriented inquiry we believe is essential for understanding agency & narrative, digital spaces, and individual & community sensemaking as tractable design challenges rather than abstract problems.

Across the year, members of the JOPRO community participated in and learned from a number of adjacent ecosystems. We attended events and followed the growth of Advancing Humans with AI (MIT), a community whose emphasis on human-centered AI aligns closely with our own concerns, and whose continued evolution we’re excited to see in the year ahead.

We’ve also been in conversation with, and inspired by, organizations like Distributed AI Research Institute, particularly around their Possible Futures workshop series, which foregrounds participatory approaches to imagining technological trajectories. Similarly, many in our community engaged with , including participation in the Oxford AI x Philosophy Seminar — a reminder of how valuable serious philosophical engagement remains in technical domains.

In more applied and embodied spaces, JOPRO members attended events hosted by groups like Augmentation Lab, and we exhibited at the AugLab Summit at the MIT Media Lab. In addition to supporting the Summit, our colleagues at convened numerous salons and events across crucial frontiers — creating space for reflective engagement with questions of technology, “Cognition Futures,” and human experience. Together, these environments challenged us to think more carefully about how narratives, interfaces, and systems shape human capability.

We also engaged with communities focused on values, responsibility, and career pathways, including School for Moral Ambition, whose work on alternative and impactful career trajectories resonates strongly with many in the our network. We reconnected with collaborators at Princeton Envision, as they revived the Envision conference series with renewed emphasis on data ethics and responsible AI.

Taken together, these relationships reflect a simple conviction: no single organization will solve the problems we’re facing. Progress depends on overlapping communities, shared language, and people willing to operate across boundaries — intellectually, institutionally, and ethically. JOPRO’s work this year has been shaped by that belief, and the projects we built grew directly out of these ongoing conversations and collaborations.

What we advanced this year

This year at JOPRO was less about scaling a single program and more about laying interlocking foundations. Across research, pedagogy, and community work, we were asking a consistent question: what does it look like to design learning, inquiry, and leadership structures that are actually responsive to the conditions people are navigating now?

Rather than answering that in the abstract, we tested it in practice — across education, research, and public engagement — letting each strand inform the others over the course of the year.

Throughout the year, much of our work focused on education and learning ecosystems. We formalized what we’ve been developing implicitly for years into a framework we call JOPRO & the New Learning Ecosystem. This work articulates an approach to learning that is contextual, developmental, and trajectory-aware — designed for interdisciplinary spaces where people are often navigating multiple identities, skill sets, and time horizons at once.

We shared this framework the spring at the UC San Diego Education Innovation Expo, using it to demonstrate how pedagogy, technology, and mentorship can be designed together rather than treated as separate layers. That same philosophy guided our participation in Google Summer of Code through Orthogonal Research and Education Lab (and sponsor International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility), where JOPRO supported scholars contributing to open-source and research projects at the intersection of computation, biology, and ethics. These efforts reinforced a core belief: meaningful learning happens when people are embedded in real problems, with real responsibility, and adequate scaffolding.

As the year progressed, this educational work increasingly intersected with public engagement and institutional presence. In the summer, JOPRO exhibited at the Human Augmentation Summit hosted at MIT Media Lab, contributing to conversations about human potential, augmentation, and the social consequences of emerging technologies. Members of our community also engaged with global research communities through conferences like ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Athens under the Data x Direction banner, exploring questions of fairness, accountability, and participatory approaches to AI.

Through our Society Ethics Technology working group, JOPRO was represented at WeRobot 2026 — a leading conference at the intersection of law, robotics, and policy — and we organized a panel at ACM’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing (NYCWiC), centering early-career researchers navigating innovation spaces across academia and industry. In these settings, JOPRO wasn’t just presenting progress; we were stress-testing ideas, building relationships, and clarifying where our voice adds value.

Running alongside this public work was a deeper strand of research and sensemaking. Over the course of the year, we developed Something In The Way: An Ethnography of 21st Century Directionlessness, a project in the Mental Health Paradigms & Perspectives working group aimed at documenting what it feels like to be adrift in contemporary life — professionally, cognitively, and morally. Drawing from ethnography and phenomenology rather than optimization frameworks, this work shaped how we think about mentorship, leadership, and learning: not as linear pipelines, but as processes that must account for uncertainty, fragmentation, and uneven development.

Late in the year, many of these threads came together. In December, we launched DigiNEST (Digital Narratives and Emerging Story Technologies), a new reading group and discussion space exploring narrativity, agency, and emerging technologies. DigiNEST sits at the intersection of digital humanities, philosophy, psychology, and design, and reflects JOPRO’s conviction that questions of ethics and governance are inseparable from questions of story, identity, and meaning-making. In many ways, DigiNEST represents a synthesis of the year’s work: a space where research, pedagogy, and community converge.

Running through all of this was a quieter but essential effort: field-building and mentorship. Projects such as From Here to There and Data x Direction (both of which are spinoffs from my capstone coursework at UC San Diego) are not products in the conventional sense; they are attempts to offer language, structure, and guidance for people navigating complex innovation landscapes without clear maps. Data x Direction, in particular, had a wonderful initial internship cohort and serves as a growing community within the broader JOPRO umbrella.

These efforts reflect a belief that leadership today is less about authority and more about helping people orient themselves — intellectually, ethically, and strategically — over time.

Taken together, this year’s work assuredly didn’t resolve the tensions we’re studying. It created shared reference points. New vocabularies. Prototypes for learning, inquiry, and collaboration that can continue to evolve. As an organization, we continued to practice incubation for projects, and grew in our capacity to cultivate context and capacity.

Vision for 2026

As we look ahead, much of our focus will be on deepening the work that began this year — and bringing it into clearer, more sustained forms.

In the coming year, JOPRO will continue to show up in public-facing spaces where questions of technology, ethics, and leadership are actively being shaped. This includes delivering a keynote at Princeton Envision in February, as well as hosting a Future of Work and Tech Careers panel at NYCWiC 2026. These moments matter to us not simply as visibility, but as opportunities to engage early-career researchers and practitioners who are navigating real decisions about where and how to apply their skills.

We’re also continuing to develop new formats for sustained inquiry and discussion. DigiNEST will grow in the year ahead as a space for grappling with narrativity, agency, and emerging technologies, and we expect to be involved in a range of additional Discussion Series, collaborations and events as these conversations evolve. Alongside this, we’re continuing to expand local gatherings in Boston and New York, as well as hybrid and virtual events with inquisitive communities such as communities ekkolapto, Frontier Tower, and the Oxford Internet Institute.

A major focus for the year ahead will be the launch of the JOPRO Futures Center. The Center is an extension of work we’ve been circling for some time: creating a dedicated space for developing meaningful alternatives to prevailing systems and assumptions. This will include exploratory projects, long-horizon research, and a forthcoming invitation-only cohort for serious philosophical and strategic discussion — focused on crafting the skills, curricula, and organizations needed to bridge the world as it is with the world as we might prefer it to be.

As always, we don’t see this as something JOPRO does alone. The most important work ahead will happen through collaboration: with people willing to think carefully, act responsibly, and take the long view even when incentives push in the opposite direction. If that resonates with you, whether as a collaborator, participant, doner, or quiet supporter, we’d love to stay in conversation.

What ultimately matters is not only what technologies are being built, but what we are able to perceive, comprehend, and coordinate as we navigate the paths they open. The quality of that understanding and the structures that support it will shape far more than any single project.

To everyone who contributed time, thought, care, and trust this year: thank you. This work is only possible because it is shared.

Jes

JOPRO coordinates and cultivates researchers, builders, and practitioners working to modernize how knowledge is generated and applied across domains.

Our work combines project incubation and operator formation with working groups, workshops, and seminar series— supporting both field-level transitions and focused research efforts, in collaboration with academic, civic, and industry partners.

We’ve grouped them across Virtual, Boston/Cambridge, and San Francisco, spanning everything from AI salons and complexity science to moral ambition, brain aging research, and a new gallery of researcher-creatives.

If you’re attending any of these, feel free to drop reflections or notes in the comments — or let us know if you’d like to meet others who will be there.

Virtual Events

The Future of Funding R&D — with Jim O’Shaughnessy & Atman Pandya (Computational Philosophy / Polymath Salon)

Jim O’Shaughnessy and Atman Pandya of O’Shaughnessy Ventures (OSV) joined the Polymath Salon to discuss emerging models for funding R&D in the arts and sciences—especially for creators, researchers, and founders working between or outside traditional academic categories.

🗓 Mon, Nov 10 — 12:30–2:30 PM ET
🔗 Event: luma.com/oshaughnessy
🎥 Replay: YouTube via
🔗 OSV: www.osv.llc

comments: “Worth checking out the video, and following ’s writings and podcast. I’m a fan of his combination of optimism and sobriety, and would encourage our community to check out opportunities from OSV proper, as well as the network present within this conversation. Thanks to Addy & Co for organizing the event — and do check out the Computational Philosophy Club at MIT for more topics; more ahead with this blossoming collective.”

Brain Inspired: Complexity Group — Discussion on Minsky (1961)

A reading and dialogue session unpacking Marvin Minsky’s “Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence,” led by Darren Lott.
🗓 Wed, Nov 12 — 12:30 PM ET
🔗 Zoom, semi-regularly, replays available via Brain Inspired - Complexity Group.

: “Paul Middlebrook (Brain Inspired) is courageously leading us as we deep dive through David Krakauer’s (Santa Fe Institute) Complexity Papers, alongside many intriguing figures (Kevin Mitchell, Anna Riedl, Luiz Pessoa, and many more!) It’s intense but if you’re interested in understanding the roots of modern complexity science, they are invaluable discussions.”

Emergence of Natural & Artificial Patterns (FAU / MPCR)

This session is kindly brought to you by the Machine Perception and Cognitive Robotics Lab at Florida Atlantic University hosted at the Sandbox AI Center at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Campus.

🗓 Wed, Nov 12 — 6:00 PM ET
🔗 Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/@mpcrlabs9710/streams

Playtest: Small Hassles Court — Metagov Governable Space-Makers Fellows (Plot Twisters)

A live playtest session of Small Hassles Court, a digital game that helps players practice interpersonal conflict resolution and self-governance, developed by the Plot Twisters collective as part of their developing Twisterland project; hosted through Metagov’s playtester community.

🗓 Fri, Nov 14 — 11:30 AM–12:30 PM ET
💻 Zoom (RSVP Required)
🔗 Event: https://luma.com/
🔗 Fellowship Info: (on Substack)

: “Check out our sister group’s progress on one component of Twisterland, our forthcoming EdTech gameworld! There will be multiple iterations of this event, so if this Friday doesn’t work, check Luma for other events. All participation and feedback is welcomed; we’re looking to build something new and quite timely! Last year, we presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s Inclusive Gaming Conference, so check out the latest developments at these playtesting events.”

Boston + Cambridge

Civil Discourse Series — What Ties a Nation Together? (Harvard Safra Center for Ethics)

A panel discussion hosted by the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics exploring the cultural, political, and social forces that hold a nation together, with a virtual Q&A component and full livestream access. Attendees must verify registration (HUID if applicable), and accessibility accommodations are available upon request.

🗓 Wed, Nov 12 — 4:30–6:00 PM ET
📍 Smith Campus Center Commons, 1350 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge
💻 Also online
🔗 Event Info: @ Harvard Ethics | YouTube Livestream

Measuring Aging Within the Human Brain — Salon with David Bennett (Hosted by MIT Prof. Manolis Kellis)

A dinner salon hosted at the home of MIT Professor Manolis Kellis featuring David Bennett, creator of the 30-year ROSMAP aging-brain cohort, discussing insights from thousands of human brains, the architecture of long-term cohort science, and his new PARDoS initiative expanding diversity and molecular depth in aging research.

🗓 Wed, Nov 12 — 6:30–8:30 PM ET
📍 Brookline, MA (private residence)
🔗 RSVP: https://forms.gle/

Redefining Success: A Conversation with Rutger Bregman on Moral Ambition @ Harvard

Hosted by David Jaffin & Laura Clancy, this talk challenges students to rethink conventional career ladders and embrace “moral ambition,” drawing on historical disruptors and launching the new $15,000 Harvard Moral Ambition Fellowship. Early attendees receive signed pre-release copies of Moral Ambition.

🗓 Fri, Nov 14 — 4:30–5:30 PM ET
📍 Harvard Science Center Room 309A
🔗 Event: https://luma.com/

Harvard x School for Moral Ambition — JOPRO Social (Hybrid)

Following the Rutger Bregman talk, JOPRO Director Jes Parent and community members will host an in-person + virtual discussion on moral ambition, alternative career pathways, and aligned initiatives JOPRO is supporting. Harvard event attendance is recommended but not required; online link provided.

🗓 Fri, Nov 14 — 5:30–6:30 PM ET
📍 Harvard Science Center Plaza, Cambridge (and forthcoming virtual component)
🔗 Event: https://luma.com/

: “See you there! I’ve been a supporter and almost worked on this project; glad to see very intentional Alternative Crafting, particularly for young folks. Stay tuned for similar efforts at Princeton, Stanford - and perhaps a university by you? Or, would you like support making your own event even outside of SMA? We can help - let’s talk!”

San Francisco

VOLUME 1: The Rise of the Researcher-Creative Opening Gala

We have a special message from Jolie Gan of :

“There’s a quiet revolution happening in scientific research.

The Distressed Scientists’ Department opens Volume 1: The Rise of the Researcher Creative, the first creative research exhibit in San Francisco on Mon, Nov 17 -- a 3-day exhibition gallery for researcher-creatives who bring their work beyond papers into tangible artifacts.

Expect code as sculpture, EEG as fashion, and bioengineered flowers, plus gallery walkthroughs, short on-stage conversations with the next generation of researchers, and a printed passport-style booklet to stamp and get signed. If you fund, create, or simply love frontier research made public, this room is for you.”

🗓 Fri, Nov 17-19
📍 Pebblebed, 1417 15th St, San Francisco
🔗 RSVP here: luma.com/

: “This looks to be a wonderful event - I wish I could attend in person! SF crew, please show up and support this. Perhaps we can do a similar event in Boston next year? , looking at you!”

FrontierTower

Multiple Events. Too many to list! Check out the many things going on at Frontier Tower, perhaps best by following them on Luma!

That’s a wrap

There’s everything on our radar for this week — but we’re sure we’ve missed something. If you’re hosting an event, know of one we should include, or want help coordinating a gathering in your city or university, reach out or drop a note in the comments.

Leave a comment

A Sneak Peak at 2026

Stay tuned for JOPRO at Princeton Envision (February) and New York Celebration of Women in Computing (April). The development of the JOPRO Futures Center is also underway — stay tuned for forthcoming newsletters around such.

Get involved!

And if you’d like to collaborate with JOPRO, connect with folks in the network, or explore hosting aligned programming (moral ambition, alternative career paths, operator labs, futurist practice), we’re always happy to talk.

Interested in any of these opportunities — or would you like to collaborate on related projects or initiatives? We’ll send RFPs, dates, and materials as they open. We look forward to hearing from you.

👉 One step for everything: [Interest Form]

See you out there — and keep us posted on what you’re building.

— The JOPRO Team

JOPRO is excited to share news from our partners at the Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory (OREL). OREL has announced its 2025 cohort of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Contributors, who will be contributing to open-source projects that advance collaborative research and innovation.

Each year, the GSoC program connects early-career technologists with mentor organizations to gain real-world experience in open-source development. OREL’s participation reflects its commitment to building accessible, community-driven research tools and fostering the next generation of scholars.

As a partner organization, JOPRO celebrates OREL’s dedication to mentorship, open science, and innovation—values that resonate deeply with our own mission as both a research and vocation incubator.

We look forward to following the work of this year’s scholars as they bring forward new ideas and strengthen the ecosystem of open, collaborative research.

Read the full announcement and meet the 2025 GSoC scholars here: Welcome to Our Google Summer of Code Scholars for 2025 – OREL

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility and The OpenWorm Foundation for continued funding and support during Google Summer of Code.

For more about OREL’s legacy of Google Summer of Code & Summer Cohort, view our GSoC & Summer Cohort archive page.

A version of this post originally appeared on JOPRO.org

JOPRO will join faculty, students, and technologists at the 2025 UC San Diego Education Innovation Expo (May 21–22) to explore cutting-edge pedagogy and educational technologies reshaping higher education. The two-day event offered a vibrant exchange of ideas, showcasing projects aimed at enhancing creativity, access, and impact across the university and beyond.

Founder and Director Jesse Parent will deliver a talk on “JOPRO & the New Learning Ecosystem: Designing Tools and Communities to Foster Contextual, Developmental, and Trajectory-Aware Learning in Inter-/Un-disciplinary Spaces.” The talk outlines JOPRO’s evolving model as an interdisciplinary research and vocation incubator, emphasizing the need for learning systems that are historically grounded, strategically oriented, and responsive to the complex paths of 21st-century learners.

The presentation featured FrontierMap, a tool to help learners understand trajectories in emerging frontiers of study; case studies on alternative education approaches (Orthogonal Research and Education Lab and Neuromatch Academy); alongside the EdTech example of of narrative-driven initiative Plot Twisters, which center personal agency and co-designed learning in AI-mediated environments.

JOPRO’s participation will emphasize the importance of context-aware mentorship, nonlinear career scaffolding, and ethical foresight in preparing students to contribute meaningfully across academia, policy, and industry.

More information about the Education Innovation Expo

educationalinnovation.ucsd.edu

A version of this post originally appeared on JOPRO.org

As 2025 picks up steam, we at JOPRO want to take a moment to celebrate the strides we’ve made in interdisciplinary research, innovation, and community-building. From civic imagination initiatives to groundbreaking work in developmental biology, mental health paradigms, and embodied cognition, our teams have pursued a diverse range of projects united by a shared commitment to bridging present challenges with tomorrow’s possibilities. Here’s a look back at some of the highlights.

1. JOPRO a Winner at Fandom Forward Civic Imagination Challenge

Read the full announcement
One of our proudest moments of 2024 was being selected as a winner of the Fandom Forward Civic Imagination Challenge, recognizing our vision for uniting creativity, storytelling, and community engagement to drive positive change. This honor reaffirms JOPRO’s mission to imagine and implement more hopeful futures through collaborative research and mentorship.

2. OREL Participates in the Active Inference Institute’s 4th Symposium

Read more about OREL’s contributions
The Orthogonal Research & Education Lab (OREL) took part in the 4th Symposium hosted by the Active Inference Institute, sharing insights on developmental neurosimulation, open-source collaboration and mentoring & project management for innovators, and the role of active inference in interdisciplinary science. This event underscored our commitment to open knowledge-sharing, as team members showcased ongoing R&D efforts on embodied cognition and modeling.

3. Review of Braitenberg Vehicles and Dynamics

Alicea reviews “Open Dynamics of Braitenberg Vehicles”
In keeping with our focus on computational frameworks, Dr. Bradly Alicea offered a thoughtful review of Open Dynamics of Braitenberg Vehicles. The review explores the evolving theoretical perspectives on how simple agent-based models can illustrate complex developmental processes—an important stepping stone for future AI and cognitive research.

4. Embodied Neurophenomenology Project

Learn about the project
Seeking a holistic approach to understanding cognition, this initiative integrates phenomenological methods and neuroscientific data to probe subjective experience. By bridging philosophical inquiry with empirical measurement, the project aims to uncover new ways of mapping and enhancing human mental states.

5. Phasic Physical Intelligence & Complexity

Read about phasic PI
This exploratory effort examines how “phasic” shifts in physical and cognitive states might be harnessed for augmented intelligence. Combining complexity science with innovative hardware and software solutions, the team investigates new forms of synergy between biological organisms and their environments.

6. AI and Liability: New Thesis Publication

Schnake Publishes Thesis
Congratulations to the newest scholarship on AI liability, analyzing how legal frameworks address responsibility when autonomous systems cause harm or loss. An original founding member of the Society Ethics Technology (SET) team, Valeria Schnake, has published her thesis, which contributes to SET’s mission of highlighting ethical and social dimensions of emerging technologies, offering insights valuable for policymakers, developers, and researchers alike.

7. Inside-Out Film Series for Mental Health

Project Primer
As part of JOPRO’s Mental Health Paradigms and Practices working group, the team examined mental health relative to how the Inside-Out Film Series used cinematic narratives to spark conversations around well-being, emotional intelligence, and societal perspectives on mental health. This creative approach aligns with our strategy of merging education, media, and open dialogue to tackle complex human issues.

8. DevoGraph: Advancing Developmental Biology through Computation

Explore the D-GNNs Project
A highlight for our computational biology enthusiasts is the DevoGraph project, which leverages graph-based analysis and developmental neural networks to model organism growth and cellular interactions. It represents yet another frontier where data-driven approaches can shed light on the intricacies of life sciences.

9. Challenging Hegemonic Bias in Mental Health

Investigate Hegemonic Bias
This inquiry delves into cultural and systemic biases embedded in contemporary mental health paradigms, urging practitioners and researchers to reevaluate diagnostic and therapeutic standards. By identifying blind spots, we aim to foster more inclusive, equitable frameworks for understanding human well-being.

10. Plot Twisters at Oxford Internet Institute’s Inclusive Gaming Conference

More about the event here

In April 2024, partner group Plot Twisters presented at the Inclusive Gaming Conference hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. As part of the Co-design Practices for Games panel, the team showcased their interdisciplinary approach to emotional literacy, narrative world-building, and edtech game development. Drawing from research in self-reflection and developmental design, the presentation reflected Plot Twisters’ mission to use interactive storytelling as a means of fostering emotional awareness, inclusive futures, and innovative educational tools.

11. Embodied Intelligence 2024

Check out the event
Finally, Orthogonal Research and Education Lab and Cognition Futures continued its tradition of hosting dialogues on embodied intelligence by returning to The International Conference on Embodied Intelligence. The event brings together neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, engineers, and philosophers. These cross-disciplinary gatherings are instrumental in shaping next-generation approaches to intelligence—human, artificial, or somewhere in between.

Looking Ahead

We’re excited to build on these accomplishments in 2025, with plans for more collaborative research, new mentoring cohorts, and initiatives that expand the conversation around human-centered AI, cognitive development, mental health, and beyond.

In particular, be sure to follow our latest publications for associated project updates and forthcoming internship opportunities:

• From Here to There: Strategy & Mentoring & for Innovators

• Data x Direction

Thank you for following our journey—stay tuned for fresh updates, event announcements, and collaborative opportunities in the coming months!

As always, if you’d like to get involved, have an idea to share, or simply want to learn more about JOPRO’s mission, feel free to reach out or check out our main website. We look forward to forging new paths together in the pursuit of a more innovative and connected future.

With gratitude,
The JOPRO Team

Innovation Panel @ ACM’s NYCWC 2025

We are pleased to announce that JOPRO Director Jesse Parent will be organizing and moderating a featured panel at the Association for Computing Machinery’s New York Celebration of Women in Computing (NYCWiC) 2025. The panel, titled "Navigating Innovation Spaces: A Discussion on Finding Your Way When Building & Creating across Industry, Academia, and Startup Environments," will bring together early-career researchers and professionals to share insights from their diverse experiences across innovation ecosystems.

“Innovation space are vital to our future, but also somewhat complicated and everyone’s initial exposure to them can be quite different,” Parent said of the Panel. “We’ve assembled an exciting group of panelists, and I’m thrilled to be hosting this conversation at NYCWiC, a community that consistently fosters inclusive, early-career engagement with the technologies and ideas shaping tomorrow.”

The panel will feature five speakers working across different sectors, including former Orthogonal Research and Education Lab intern Samantha Carollo, who completed her internship while a senior at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Panel Details

Panel Title: Navigating Innovation Spaces: A Discussion on Finding Your Way When Building & Creating across Industry, Academia, and Startup Environments

Moderator: Jesse Parent (University of California, San Diego; JOPRO; Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory; Simmons University)

Panelists:

• Clair Hayden (Velan Studios)

• Jeannette Bender (IBM)

• Kelly Yang (IBM)

• Minh Tran (General Dynamics)

• Samantha Carollo (GE Vernova)

More information about ACM’s NCWiC 2025

Date: April 11-12, 2025
Location: Poughkeepsie NY

For the full NYCWiC 2025 program, visit: NYCWiC 2025 Program
Learn more about the conference at: nycwic.org

A version of this post appeared originally on JOPRO.org

The Honest Majority believes in the power of honesty for building better relationships, communities, and futures. In partnership with Plot Twisters, a game design collective dedicated to personal storytelling and positive self-reflection, we invite you to participate in The Honest Storytelling Challenge — a storytelling contest for reflecting on and writing about honesty from your perspective.

Please share and submit your entries to the Contest Homepage. Three specific categories of Humor, Surprise, and Insight, will be used to determine winners, alongside one Grand Prize winner.

For more background on the contest, and its imagery within the promotional flyer above:

At a glance, the illustrations depict kintsugi, 金継ぎ, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with powdered gold lacquer to symbolize how brokenness doesn’t inevitably mean hopelessness or worthlessness that can only be tossed out or shamefully covered up; with delicate care and a little creativity, it’s possible to mend the pieces back together in order to create something far more beautiful than mere, impossible “perfection.”

What “the something far more beautiful” is, well, that’s up to you to decide: transformation? Art? Meaning? Acceptance of yourself? Of reality? THSC is here to prompt critical thinking, introspection, and reflection: the rest is left as a challenge to the reader. While there is a high chance of winning a prize, this is not a competition against others as much as a challenge for each entrant to try to be better than who you were before and to tell the story for others to hear. Truly look inside yourself, every forgotten, dusty, or hidden corner. Honestly ask: who am I? What do I value? Why? What is my evidence? What factors made it so difficult for me to know this before? (Add in your own questions here.) This is an opportunity for you to explore your relationship to critical thought, truth, and understanding. We encourage you to dig deeply and share your observations by telling a story that challenges all of us.

Continue reading THM’s Contest introduction, and other updates, at:

• The Honest Storytelling Challenge: Our Origin Story & Why

• The Honest Majority: Community Forum

UPDATE 2023-01-23

JOPRO Director Jesse Parent on being a Honest Storytelling Challenge judge:

It’s been inspiring, hands-down. The act of creating story-artifacts, these objects in the world that offer others to have points of interface, out of our inner experiences and thoughts - it always feels good to be able to celebrate such. If you have community around the process, and establish that it’s OK to talk about the harder things; this feels deeply human. I hope the Storytelling Contest has created a specific call-to-action in writing these artistic generations, but even more so, is one more breeze of encouragement that we can make spaces for everyone’s stories to be heard. Writing stories, sharing and celebrating the meaning of our thoughts and experiences — that has to be a super power that we have, which we have the fortune of cultivating, with and for each other.

Stay tuned, as winners should be announced this week!

www.thehonestmajority.org

Samantha Carollo is a participant in the OREL undergraduate research intern program. This research is part of JOPRO & OREL’s Society, Ethics, and Technology theme.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings. While we do not need to intentionally think about being empathetic before doing so, it is nevertheless a core component of our everyday behavior. Often, exhibiting empathy is often as automatic as breathing. For Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become more human-like, it must master empathy.

Humans utilize four types of intelligence: mechanical, analytical, intuitive, and empathetic. All these types of intelligence are required for AI to behave something resembling human (Huang & Rust, 2018). While mechanical, analytical, and intuitive intelligence are very easy for AI to replicate, empathetic intelligence is not. This is because AI training generally occurs in the form of repetition and reasoning. By contrast, empathy is emotional, and cannot be acquired through training. Pure, raw emotion is what allows humans to connect with other humans in a deep and meaningful way that a machine cannot yet understand.

Of the four types of intelligence, empathetic intelligence is the most difficult for AI to replicate. As hard as it is for humans to process each other’s emotions, this task is much harder to implement in robots. The task of creating empathetic AI involves seems simple enough: describe a machine that can generate emotional responses. Yet to be successful at generating the correct emotional response, empathetic AI also needs the ability to analyze and understand human emotions. Empathy is the most important thing for Artificial Intelligence to have because emotions are a critical component of how humans process everyday situations. In fact, if an AI cannot process empathy, then it will simply be unsuccessful in everyday life.

Three key components of empathy need to be replicated in order for AI to replicate the everyday behavior of humans: emotional empathy, motivational empathy, and cognitive empathy. Emotional and motivational empathy help humans both experience the world around them and figure out how to cope with everyday challenges. Cognitive empathy is used to help others recognize their emotions and process the situation they are in, and ultimately in determining how to proceed (Montemayor et al. 2021). These three components make up the multidimensional nature of empathy, without which human-level intelligence would seem quite different.

“Empathic behaviors are thought to be learned through social interactions with humans in the framework of (cognitive) developmental robotics” (Asada, 2015).

Another reason to discuss the concept of empathetic intelligence in AI has to do with job automation. An ever-increasing number of jobs are becoming automated. As job automation will affect many aspects of human life and livelihood, it will also change the workforce as we know it. Think about customer service/retail jobs. The self-checkout line might be more convenient, but results in one less human is being paid to do this job. In the field of healthcare, where empathy is a key skill, people are going to feel less comfortable in tragic or crisis situations.

The main need for empathetic AI in an automated workforce is to avoid the serious risk to humans when an AI cannot handle the emotional demands of a particular job. As Montemayor et.al (2021, pg. 5) put it: “autonomy and agency are the hallmarks of attentive agents — this is how their mental actions are not simply accidentally correct — and only attentive agents can care for others”. In a positive development, some groups that develop healthcare AI systems are being cautious and incorporating some form of empathetic capacity into their applications.

Emotions are what make human life exciting, from a child laughing in the playground to an adult having a passive-aggressive argument at work, emotions are what make life and without the empathy to understand those emotions life seems empty. They are also essential from a broader cognitive standpoint as well: empathy is intimately related to emotional processing in the context of understanding child’s laughter as happiness or an argument at work as passive aggressive. While there’s no predicting whether future artificial intelligence will be able to generate and process empathy at human levels, we must consider that today’s technology is lacking. The ability of AIs to process human emotion is the final step in making them more human-like, and this means opening the next chapter in this emerging technological field. Once empathetic intelligence becomes an unquestionable part of AI applications, AI itself becomes less a concept of science fiction and more a vital part of our reality.

Further reading: Artificial Empathy (Wikipedia), Uncanny Valley (Wikipedia), Robot Ethics (Wikipedia)

References
Asada, M. (2015). Development of artificial empathy. Neuroscience Research, 90, 41–50.

Davenport, T., & Kalakota, R. (2019). The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare. Future Healthcare Journal, 6(2), 94.

Huang, M.-H., & Rust, R. T. (2018). Artificial intelligence in service. Journal of Service Research, 21(2), 155–172.

Montemayor, C., Halpern, J., & Fairweather, A. (2021). In principle obstacles for empathic AI: Why we can’t replace human empathy in healthcare. AI & Society, May.

[This article was originally posted on OREL’s Medium publication]

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