Position: AI as Part of Self -- Extending the Mind Requires Cognitive Co-Regulation

TL;DR

This paper advocates for integrating AI into human cognition through co-regulation to ensure safety and alignment, emphasizing the importance of symbiotic human-AI systems over external control.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of cognitive co-regulation as essential for alignment, drawing on System 0 cognition theory and proposing design principles for human-AI integration.

Findings

AI shapes pre-attentive infrastructures influencing trust and agency.

Unstructured delegation risks include deskilling and epistemic centralization.

Co-regulation fosters resilience and epistemic agency in human-AI systems.

Abstract

This position paper argues that safety and alignment cannot be achieved by constraining an external system: they must emerge from the co-regulatory design of the human--AI cognitive system as a whole ("AI as Part of Self"). Contemporary AI increasingly participates in attention allocation, reasoning, synthesis, and decision-making, shaping the very cognitive processes through which humans form beliefs, make decisions, and constitute their sense of self. Humans and AI occupy complementary epistemic roles under mutual constraint, forming a symbiotic cognitive unit whose co-regulation -- not the external control of either party alone -- is the proper locus of alignment. We identify the risks of unstructured delegation: deskilling, automation bias, transfer of epistemic authority, and oracle-style centralization of knowledge. Drawing on System~0 cognition theory, we further show that AI operates prior to conscious deliberation, shaping the pre-attentive infrastructures through which agency and trust are negotiated -- a level that conventional oversight cannot reach. We conclude with design principles for cognitive co-regulation addressed to ML engineers and governance bodies. The goal of this work is to guide human cognition toward resilience and epistemic agency at the foundation of human selfhood.