You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
AI is quickly becoming part of how people think, judge, and make decisions. That changes the problem. A system can give a polished and useful answer while quietly narrowing the person’s own reasoning, hiding weak assumptions, or making a premature decision feel more certain than it really is.
I started Phenogenesis to work on this exact boundary.
Phenogenesis is a human-centered interaction architecture designed to help people use advanced AI without giving up judgment, responsibility, or authorship of important decisions. It works at the level of the interaction itself: how the question is formed, which assumptions remain hidden, whether the person’s original meaning is preserved, and whether the final response strengthens human reasoning or begins to replace it.
The project already has a developed conceptual framework, a working prototype environment, early live testing, a pilot protocol, and defined safety boundaries. Public information is available here: https://simpliotics.com/en/project-phenogenesis.html
This funding would support a six-month pilot with approximately 20-30 participants. The pilot will test Phenogenesis in real reasoning and decision situations, collect anonymized cases, refine the interaction design, develop practical evaluation criteria, and produce a public report on what worked, what failed, and what should be tested next.
The deeper goal is simple: as AI systems become stronger, human control must remain real inside the act of thinking, not only formal on paper.
I want this pilot to answer one practical question: can a person work with powerful AI, gain real value from it, and still remain the author of the reasoning and the final decision?
The first goal is to identify the moments inside an AI interaction where human judgment becomes stronger or weaker. This includes the way a question is framed, the assumptions that go unexamined, the loss or preservation of the person’s original meaning, and the point where useful assistance begins to turn into cognitive dependence.
The second goal is to test whether the Phenogenesis architecture can improve these moments in practice. I will work with approximately 20-30 participants using real strategic, research, and creative problems. The same types of tasks will be examined through standard language-model interaction and through the Phenogenesis environment, so that the differences can be observed rather than assumed.
The project will collect anonymized cases and review what changed during each interaction: whether the problem became clearer, whether hidden assumptions became visible, whether uncertainty was handled honestly, and whether the participant still experienced the final judgment as their own.
The pilot will remain within low-risk contexts. Medical, legal, financial, and irreversible personal decisions will stay outside its scope. The work will be reviewed continuously, and the prototype, interaction logic, and evaluation criteria will be refined as evidence accumulates.
By the end of six months, the project will produce a documented pilot method, an anonymized or synthetic case set, practical evaluation criteria for human-side AI safety, an improved working prototype, and a public report describing the results, limitations, failures, and the questions that still need to be answered.
The minimum funding level is $50,000. This would allow me to run a smaller but complete version of the pilot, with a reduced participant group, a stable working interface, structured case collection, core analysis, and an initial public report.
The full funding goal is $100,000. This would support the complete six-month pilot and give the project enough depth to produce evidence that can be taken seriously.
The main costs are straightforward. Funding will cover full-time project leadership and methodological work, further development of the working interface, participant recruitment and compensation, research design, case review, evaluation, secure data storage, language-model access, and an independent safety and methodological review.
Part of the funding will also support English-language adaptation. The project was developed outside the English-speaking AI safety ecosystem, and careful adaptation is necessary so that the method, findings, and limitations can be understood and evaluated internationally.
The final stage will include preparation and publication of the pilot report, anonymized or synthetic case materials, and the evaluation framework that can be shared publicly without exposing the project’s proprietary core.
There is no organizational overhead in this request. The funding will go directly into building, running, examining, and documenting the pilot.
Phenogenesis is currently founder-led.
I created the project and have carried it from the first conceptual work through the interaction architecture, prototype development, testing, pilot design, and preparation for external research.
I have more than 30 years of experience in strategy, communications, management systems, decision-making, and the development of new project categories. Much of my work has focused on a recurring question: why do people and organizations lose clarity, create unnecessary complexity, and gradually hand over responsibility for decisions to systems, procedures, or other people?
Phenogenesis grew directly from that work. It combines long-term research into human reasoning with practical experience in building decision systems, shaping complex projects, and turning abstract ideas into working structures.
The project already has a developed methodology, a working prototype environment, an implemented interaction-control architecture, early live use, a pilot protocol, safety boundaries, and a growing body of engineering evidence.
I am leading the project because its conceptual continuity matters. The same person who developed the underlying theory is also responsible for the interaction logic, the research questions, and the boundaries of what the system should and should not do.
The grant would allow me to add the missing external capacity: technical support, participant coordination, research assistance, and independent methodological and AI safety review. This would strengthen the pilot without fragmenting responsibility for the project’s core.
The project can fail in several honest ways.
The first is that the pilot may not show a meaningful difference between standard AI interaction and the Phenogenesis environment. The architecture may work only for some types of people, questions, or decision situations. It may also add too much friction and make the interaction feel heavier than the value it creates.
The second risk is methodological. Human judgment is difficult to measure. Participants may respond to novelty, expectations, or the presence of the researcher rather than to the architecture itself. A small pilot may reveal strong patterns without producing evidence broad enough for general conclusions.
The third risk is that the evaluation criteria may remain too dependent on interpretation. Concepts such as preserved meaning, decision authorship, and stronger reasoning must become observable enough to be examined by people outside the project.
The pilot is designed to make these failures visible. It will use comparable tasks, explicit evaluation criteria, anonymized case review, repeated examination of difficult examples, and independent methodological and AI safety input.
I will report negative and ambiguous results directly. If Phenogenesis works only in narrow conditions, those limits will become part of the findings. If some parts of the architecture fail while others show value, the project will separate them rather than presenting the system as a single success or failure.
Even an unsuccessful pilot would produce useful evidence about where human-side AI safety is difficult to measure, which interaction patterns do not preserve judgment, and what a stronger future study would need to test.
Phenogenesis has not received external funding during the last 12 months.
I have personally funded and carried out the conceptual development, prototype work, documentation, engineering testing, and early live use. This allowed the project to reach a working stage before seeking outside support.
I have now begun applying to a small number of international grant programs to fund the next research stage. At the time of this application, no external grant money has been received.