Exploring privacy-preserving infrastructure that helps AI-enabled systems adapt to human needs while preserving agency, accessibility, and meaningful participation.
Exploring privacy-preserving infrastructure that helps AI-enabled systems adapt to human needs while preserving agency, accessibility, and meaningful participation.
Project Details
Updated 07/11/26 · Provided via application · VerifiedPeople shouldn’t have to repeatedly explain how they should be served. We’ve built excellent infrastructure for proving identity, but very little infrastructure for communicating human context. I propose the Adaptive Layer: a standards-based, open-source framework for securely and selectively communicating user-controlled adaptive attributes through trusted digital credentials.
Rather than communicating identity alone, trusted credentials could optionally communicate selected adaptive attributes with explicit user consent. The objective is not to disclose more information. It’s to disclose only what is necessary to create a better interaction.
This project is currently me, myself, and I exploring use cases and potential collaborations with other like-minded folks and organizations. I’d like to bring an IRL experience to life where people can feel what adaptive environments could become, paired with an open-source framework that artists, designers, technologists, museums, cities, healthcare systems, schools, and public spaces could build on over time.
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/11/26 · By grantmaking.aiAs AI becomes embedded in healthcare, employment, education, finance, transportation, and public serves, more human decisions and opportunities will be mediated by systems that are optimized around standardized users. If those systems can’t recognize human variation without collecting extensive personal data, they may deepen exclusion, increase dependence on opaque institutions, and reduce people’s ability to participate meaningfully in society.
The Adaptive Layer would explore whether trusted, user-controlled attributes can help AI-enabled systems respond to individual needs while preserving privacy, consent, and agency. My theory is that societies will be better able to oversee and govern increasingly capable AI if people remain included, informed, and capable of participating in the institutions shaped by it. This would not solve AI existential risk by itself, but it may strengthen the human resilience and pluralism needed to recognize, challenge, and respond to dangerous uses of AI.
I also believe this could have preventative value beyond accessibility alone. By reducing exclusion and making participation easier and more dignified, adaptive systems may strengthen belonging, agency, and access to purposeful activity, helping address some of the conditions associated with deaths of despair. I see that as a hypothesis worth testing carefully, not a guaranteed outcome.
People
Updated 07/11/26 · By grantmaking.aiTeam Member
Discussion
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