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Over the past year, while working intensively with generative AI in research and writing, I became increasingly interested in a problem that is easy to overlook. AI can clearly help people work faster, find information, compare arguments, and improve their writing. But I also began to notice another possibility: when assistance becomes continuous, the human user may gradually hand over parts of the thinking process itself.
This led me to a question that now sits at the center of my research: when does AI assistance stop supporting human agency and begin to substitute for it?
I call this problem cognitive displacement. The concern is not simply that AI may produce wrong answers. A deeper problem arises when a person remains formally responsible for a judgment while the reasoning needed to form and own that judgment has increasingly been delegated to an AI system.
This project will develop a practical framework for identifying that transition and examining its consequences for human agency, judgment ownership, and responsibility in AI-assisted decision-making.
My main goal is to develop a clear and usable framework for identifying when AI assistance begins to displace rather than support human judgment. I want to move the idea of cognitive displacement from a theoretical concern toward something that researchers and institutions can actually recognize and evaluate.
I will focus on three questions. First, what is being delegated to AI: information retrieval, reasoning, evaluation, or the final judgment itself? Second, does the human user still understand and independently endorse the reasoning behind the outcome? Third, when something goes wrong, is responsibility still meaningfully connected to the person who formally made the decision?
I will develop the project in stages. I will first refine the conceptual distinction between assistance, delegation, dependency, substitution, and displacement. I will then build a Cognitive Displacement Assessment Framework (CDAF) with practical indicators for assessing whether meaningful human judgment is being preserved.
I will test and refine the framework through case studies in three areas where AI assistance is becoming increasingly important: education, academic research, and institutional decision-making. These cases will help identify where the framework works, where it needs revision, and where different contexts require different thresholds.
The final outputs will include a research paper presenting the theoretical argument, the CDAF as an openly available assessment framework, three applied case studies, and a shorter governance brief explaining how organizations can preserve meaningful human judgment while still benefiting from AI assistance.
The funding will primarily provide protected research time over a 12-month period, allowing me to carry out this project as a sustained independent research program rather than alongside unrelated paid work. It will also support research assistance, literature and case-study development, research and AI tools, external expert review, and the preparation and dissemination of the project's outputs.
At the minimum funding level of $25,000, I will complete the core research program: the theoretical development of cognitive displacement, the Cognitive Displacement Assessment Framework (CDAF), focused case analysis, and the main research paper.
If the project reaches the full $40,000 funding goal, I will expand the case-study component across education, academic research, and institutional decision-making; obtain additional external expert review of the framework; strengthen the comparative analysis; and produce the full set of open research and governance outputs.
The additional funding would therefore increase the scope and external validation of the project rather than change its central research question. A more detailed budget and accounting of research expenses can be provided if requested.
I am a solo independent researcher based in Putrajaya, Malaysia. My research focuses on human agency, epistemic responsibility, cognitive displacement, responsible AI, and the ethical governance of artificial intelligence.
This project grows out of an existing and continuing research program rather than a new interest developed for this funding application. Over the past year, my work with generative AI has led me to examine a recurring problem: as AI systems become increasingly involved in reasoning, writing, evaluation, and decision-making, it becomes more difficult to determine where assistance ends and substitution begins, and whether the human user still meaningfully owns the resulting judgment.
I have developed the concept of cognitive displacement to describe and analyze this problem. My related research examines responsible agency, judgment ownership, epistemic responsibility, human oversight, and the allocation of responsibility in AI-mediated decisions. I have pursued these questions through research manuscripts, working papers, preprints, and longer-form scholarly work.
A directly related paper is “When Assistance Becomes Substitution: A Theory of Cognitive Displacement in the Age of Generative AI,” which is publicly available as an SSRN preprint. The present project takes the next step: moving from the theoretical account of cognitive displacement toward a practical framework that can help identify when AI assistance preserves human judgment and when it begins to displace it.
I do not currently hold a funded university research position and do not have an institutional research team. The work leading to this proposal has been independently developed and self-funded. My research identity, ongoing work, publicly available papers, and published books can be independently checked through the following public sources:
Academic Research Library
https://salahibnmusa.com/#papers
SSRN Author Profile
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=12675908
Academia.edu — Independent Researcher
https://independentresearcher.academia.edu/SalahIbnMusa
Web of Science Researcher Profile
Researcher ID: QWD-3093-2026
https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/QWD-3093-2026
ORCID
0009-0003-0692-9531
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0692-9531
Published Books — Amazon Author Page
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Salah-Ibn-Musa/author/B0HJ1GMNG4/allbooks
Manifund support would allow me to turn this existing body of independently developed work into a sustained 12-month research project. The funding would provide the time and resources needed to refine the theory, develop the Cognitive Displacement Assessment Framework (CDAF), apply it to concrete cases, obtain external critical review, and produce openly available research and governance outputs.
The risk of this project failing to produce its core outputs is low. This is primarily a theoretical and conceptual research project rather than an empirical study dependent on participant recruitment, experimental results, proprietary datasets, or access to external institutions. The central research question, conceptual framework, case analysis, and written outputs can therefore be completed within the researcher's direct control.
The main foreseeable challenge is one of scope rather than feasibility. Human reliance on AI appears in many different settings, and the concept of cognitive displacement could easily expand beyond what can be treated rigorously in a single project. I will manage this by keeping the project focused on one central question—when AI assistance begins to substitute for meaningful human judgment—and by using education, academic research, and institutional decision-making as bounded applications of the framework.
A second challenge is ensuring that the Cognitive Displacement Assessment Framework (CDAF) remains practically understandable without oversimplifying the underlying philosophical questions. This will be addressed through iterative refinement, concrete cases, and external critical review.
I am confident that the core deliverables can be completed within the proposed 12-month period because they extend an existing body of research rather than beginning from zero. The theory of cognitive displacement and the related work on human agency, judgment ownership, and responsibility have already been under development. Funding would enable me to consolidate, extend, test through structured cases, and translate this work into a usable framework.
If some applications require further development beyond the project period, this would affect the breadth of the framework rather than the completion of the core project. The central theoretical framework, CDAF, research paper, case analyses, and governance-oriented outputs would still be delivered.
I have not received external research funding during the past 12 months. The research leading to this project, including my work on cognitive displacement, human agency, judgment ownership, and responsibility in AI-mediated decision-making, has been independently developed and self-funded.
This proposal would therefore represent the first dedicated external funding for this research program. It would allow me to devote sustained research time and resources to developing the existing theoretical work into the full Cognitive Displacement Assessment Framework (CDAF), applied case studies, and openly available research and governance outputs.
There are no bids on this project.