LEARNING UNDER THREE SUPERVISORS: THE PARENTS AND GOD DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PGPHD) AS A LIFELONG, VALUE-ANCHORED MODEL OF RESEARCH FOR HUMAN-CENTRED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Doctoral research is usually defined by an institution, a supervisor and a finite timeline, yet much of what makes a researcher (character, curiosity, gratitude and the courage to attempt unconventional ideas) is formed long before and long after any thesis defence. This article examines the Parents and GOD Doctor of Philosophy (PGPhD), a self-designated, non-conferred thesis whose supervisors are the author’s parents and GOD, whose institute is planet Earth, and whose content is stated to be a lifetime collection of more than one hundred articles on Artificial Intelligence and Real Intelligence. Using qualitative document analysis of the thesis cover document and the author’s curriculum vitae, with every claim labelled as documented, self-reported or interpretive, we reconstruct the structure of the PGPhD, trace fourteen years of independent output and extract design principles. The thesis document has eight components; itemised output rose from one entry in 2012 to twelve in 2026; and the work moved from naming new fields to testing them, including a reproducible fairness experiment in which a penalty term cut a demographic-parity gap by about 87% at a cost of about 1.9 accuracy points. We distil seven principles (gratitude, guidance, service, openness, transparency, testing and perseverance) and show how each has an analogue in swarm and evolutionary search. We argue that the PGPhD is best read not as a credential but as a motivational model: a way for any learner, inside or outside academia, to turn a lifetime into a coherent, accountable and kind research programme.