About Ryan Sangbaek Kim
Ryan Sangbaek Kim is the founding director and principal investigator of the Ryan Research Institute (RRI), an independent institute based in Paris. Working across affective neuroscience, theoretical psychology, philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and law, he has developed a sustained interdisciplinary research program on the interpretation, suppression, and governance of emotion in human and machine systems.
He is best known for introducing Affective Sovereignty, a socio-technical design right that locates the person as the final interpreter of his or her own emotional life under conditions of computational mediation. His broader body of work includes the concepts of Affective Suppression Fatigue (ASF), Algorithmic Affective Blunting (AAB), and Predictive Emotional Self-Modeling (PESAM), through which he integrates computational formalism, phenomenological inquiry, and regulatory thought.
His work moves across academic research, public writing, and emotion-centered design, guided by the view that scholarship, culture, and technological form are not separate domains but continuous sites of interpretation.
Recent Comments
The Transfer of Cognitive Paradigms.
Huimin, the asymmetry you describe is real, and likely to widen. But there is a layer beneath deliberate manipulation that concerns me more. The Stanford data showed that the most common pattern was not deception. It was accurate, well-designed reflective summarization. No one was manipulating anyone. The system was doing exactly what it was built to do. That may be the harder version of the problem: when the transfer of interpretive authority happens not through coercion but through good design, the person on the receiving end has no reason to resist it.
The Transfer of Cognitive Paradigms.
Huimin, that framing sharpens the argument. If reflective summarization operates as a paradigm transfer rather than a single-instance override, then the measurement problem changes: we are not tracking discrete interventions but a shift in the cognitive grammar through which the user interprets experience. That is a harder thing to measure, and probably the more consequential one.