Human Clarity Institute — Understanding how AI and digital systems are reshaping human experience
Attention & Cognition
Measuring how AI and digital systems shape attention, cognition, and decision-making in daily life — including focus, distraction, information load, and mental effort as technology becomes persistent and always-on.
Trust & Sensemaking
Measuring how people assess credibility, authenticity, and meaning as information is increasingly mediated by digital platforms and AI systems — and how confidence and trust evolve over time.
Agency, Values & Wellbeing
Measuring how AI and digital systems affect autonomy, identity, wellbeing, and the ability to live in alignment with personal values as technology takes on a greater role in everyday life.
Why human measurement matters in the AI era
AI and digital systems increasingly shape the conditions in which people think, decide, work, and relate to the world. As these systems become part of everyday life, their influence is often subtle, cumulative, and difficult to isolate.
Human experience is not directly visible — either to the systems people use or to those who design them. Changes in judgement, trust, attention, agency, wellbeing, meaning, and values cannot be reliably inferred from system behaviour or usage patterns alone. If these changes are to be understood at scale, they must be measured deliberately, using clear concepts and consistent methods over time.
HCI exists to make human experience observable at a population level — turning what is often assumed or felt individually into evidence that can be examined, compared, and understood.
This work creates clarity where impact would otherwise remain implicit.
What HCI measures
HCI measures reported human experience as people live and work alongside AI and digital systems.
This includes how individuals experience changes in:
Attention and cognition
How focus, distraction, information load, and mental effort shift as digital environments and AI systems become more persistent in daily life.
Trust and sensemaking
How people assess credibility, authenticity, and meaning as information is increasingly shaped by digital platforms and AI-generated content.
Agency and autonomy
How control, dependence, and decision-making capacity change as systems take on a greater role in guiding choices and actions.
Wellbeing and energy
How mental fatigue, strain, and the sustainability of digital life evolve over time.
Meaning and values in practice
How purpose, identity, and the ability to live in line with personal values are affected as technology shapes daily experience.
Why this work emerges now
For the first time, AI and digital systems are not occasional tools but shared environments — used continuously, across contexts, and at population scale.
As a result, individual experiences are no longer isolated or sporadic. Patterns begin to repeat across people, roles, and regions, revealing common shifts that could not be seen when technologies were fragmented or optional.
This repetition makes systematic observation possible. What once appeared anecdotal can now be examined longitudinally, compared over time, and understood as part of a broader social pattern.
Documenting human experience at this moment helps create a public record of how life is changing alongside AI — while those changes are still emerging, rather than after they have been absorbed into the background of everyday life.
Shifts in Attention & Cognitive Load —
How patterns of concentration, information processing, and decision-making change as digital environments and AI systems become a persistent part of everyday life.
Changes in Trust & Information Judgement —
How people come to assess credibility, authenticity, and confidence in what they encounter as information is increasingly shaped by digital platforms and AI-generated content.
Growth in System-Mediated Experience —
How a growing share of daily experience — from choices to sensemaking — is shaped by algorithmic and AI-mediated systems rather than direct human interaction.
Why clarity changes things
When changes in human experience remain unclear, they are easy to dismiss, misinterpret, or internalise as personal failings.
Clarity changes this.
When patterns of attention, trust, wellbeing, agency, and values become visible at a collective level, individuals can better understand where they fit, institutions can recognise emerging shifts, and decisions can be grounded in evidence rather than assumption.
Clarity does not prescribe action.
It changes the quality of understanding on which action becomes possible.
By making human experience visible where it would otherwise remain implicit, clarity helps people orient themselves more confidently in environments shaped by AI and digital systems.
Research capability
Human Signal Lab
The Human Clarity Institute also operates the Human Signal Lab — a research capability that produces machine-ready datasets measuring human internal-state signals in the context of AI and digital systems.
The Lab supports AI research, product evaluation, and governance work by providing clean, methodologically documented survey datasets designed for comparability over time.
Learn more about the Human Signal LabExplore datasets and findings
Browse open datasets, data summaries, and research reports documenting how people experience AI and digital systems — and how those experiences change over time.