What accumulates
Corrections, context, goals, interpretations, and unfinished work.
Persistent relationships
Repeated interaction becomes part of what the system can do.
Goals, corrections, preferences, working assumptions, and unfinished decisions can begin to shape later exchanges. Current work asks where these persistent effects are carried and whether participant state, memory, artifacts, and current input sufficiently explain them.
One major program within Perfinitive Research studies this task-bound human–AI working relationship: the Operant Dyad™. Naming it makes the relationship available for inspection: how it forms, what it retains, what it enables, and where human authority can weaken.
What can change
Human judgment, capacity, dependence, and the range of possible action.
What needs governance
Authority, correction, provenance, portability, permission, and exit.
Where this is tested and developed
- Operant Dyad™ — the program page.
- Operant Dyad: Defining the Task-Bound Working Relationship in Human-AI Systems — the canonical paper.
- When Collaboration Becomes State — proposes relationship-derived operational state as a category and three testable conditions for attributing it to a specific human participant.
- Emergent Novelty in Human-AI Dyadic Systems — a theoretical framework with preliminary evidence for output that may arise from a particular pairing.
- OD-INV-01 — Relationship-State Inversion — the pre-pilot method for localizing what carries a persistent effect.
Once state persists, the next question is who governs it: continue to Human Authority.