Dignity-First Artificial Intelligence: Privacy, Ethics, and Human Agency in Stateful Systems

Research Context: This work is a core component of the Presence Engine™ Living Thesis (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17280692). This paper formalizes dignity-first architecture for stateful AI systems, establishing privacy, ethics, and human agency as computational constraints rather than compliance layers. Building on prior work in trust calibration, goal drift detection, and session continuity, Smith inverts the standard AI governance question: instead of asking how to control AI systems, the paper asks how to preserve human dignity while AI systems operate. The contribution is threefold. First, Smith identifies three mechanisms of dignity erosion in stateful systems (coercion through personalization, transparency violation, and agency displacement) grounded in recent empirical literature (Valenzuela et al. 2024; Kneer et al. 2025; Chow & Li 2024). Second, the paper specifies implementable safeguards including anti-coercion detection (engagement-truthfulness alignment monitoring), honesty requirements with confidence thresholds, and autonomy preservation through bounded system authority. Third, Smith provides working Python implementation of the Anti-Coercion Detector module, demonstrating feasibility of dignity-first constraints in production AI systems. de Winter and Eisma (2025) document that human-robot interaction research at top robotics conferences barely cites ergonomics literature, with engineers addressing human factors without field involvement. Dignity-first architecture responds to this gap by embedding human-centric constraints at the architectural level rather than as post-hoc regulatory compliance. The paper positions dignity-first architecture as both ethical imperative and market differentiator, citing healthcare AI adoption data (Nong et al. 2025) showing patient trust deficits and WMA 2025 guidelines mandating human-centricity in medical AI. The Presence Engine is proposed as the governance layer enabling enterprises to deploy stateful AI systems with auditable ethical constraints. Keywords: Dignity, human agency, privacy-first architecture, ethics-first AI, autonomous systems, human-centered design, stateful AI, ethical constraints