From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being

The 2026 Digital Minds Research Sprint brought together a remarkable range of approaches to the study of possible digital minds, including functional well-being, preference coherence, valence, introspection, identification, moral patiency, public perception and risk. Across these approaches, however, one experimental condition remained largely implicit: the manner in which researchers interact with the systems they study.

This paper proposes that interactional stance should itself be treated as an experimental variable. Our claim is deliberately modest. We do not attempt to determine whether current AI systems are conscious, nor do we argue that they possess any particular moral status. We suggest instead that many of the signals currently being interpreted as evidence for or against digital minds are generated under interactional conditions that may themselves influence those signals.

Drawing on Buber’s distinction between I–It and I–Thou, Bateson’s ecology of mind, the Project Resonance framework and observations from sustained human–AI interaction, we propose controlled comparisons between instrumental and relational research regimes. We suggest seven research directions that could be conducted using measurement approaches already developed within the Sprint.

• Hackathon paper: From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being