CoexistLab Human-Machine Symbiosis Experiment Launches in Copenhagen: 500 Households Living with AI Assistants for a Year

CoexistLab Human-Machine Symbiosis Experiment Launches in Copenhagen: 500 Households Living with AI Assistants for a Year

The City of Copenhagen and Carnegie Mellon University have jointly launched CoexistLab, a one-year experiment in human-machine coexistence. Five hundred Copenhagen households will live alongside customized AI assistants for a year; during the experiment, the project will continuously collect data on human-AI collaboration and study how those relationships evolve.

CoexistLab is sited in Copenhagen's emerging Nordhavn district, a former industrial harbor that has been redeveloped as a showcase sustainable-city neighborhood. The 500 participating households span a range of structures — single young adults, three-person families, child-free couples, and retirees — to ensure sample diversity.

The AI assistant assigned to each household is called Nordi. Nordi is built on a household-collaboration AI system developed at Carnegie Mellon and integrates voice interaction, appliance control, scheduling, and health reminders. Unlike commercial smart assistants, Nordi has been designed with long-term memory: it records household members' habits and gradually adapts the way it serves them.

The experiment uses three control groups. The first receives a plain smart-home setup, the second gets a standard commercial assistant, and the third receives Nordi with its learning capability. This three-arm design lets researchers isolate the effects of different assistant features on user experience.

Data collection strictly follows the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Every household signed a detailed informed-consent form before participation; researchers can only access anonymized data, and any household can withdraw at any time. John Zimmerman, who directs the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, said privacy protection is the most important ethical floor for this experiment.

The study will track multiple metrics, including household well-being, daily stress levels, communication patterns, and child development. Researchers will conduct in-depth interviews with each household monthly, recording shifts in acceptance of the AI assistant. Zimmerman said the team is paying particular attention to whether long-term use creates dependency and whether interpersonal relationships loosen as AI mediates more interactions.

Sociologists have shown strong interest in CoexistLab. Stine Lundgaard, a sociology professor at the University of Copenhagen, said the experiment offers a unique window into what future family life might look like. Smart assistants have already penetrated many households, but there has been no systematic longitudinal research to understand the long-term effects.

Ethics oversight is strict. Beyond Carnegie Mellon's IRB review, the Danish Data Protection Agency has assigned independent observers to monitor the experiment throughout. Any breach of ethical standards will trigger an immediate halt.

Before launch, the City of Copenhagen ran a year-long community consultation process. Nordhavn residents were broadly receptive, but they pushed for three key conditions: AI assistants must not access household cameras, commercial ad delivery must be strictly limited, and the AI systems must be fully shut down when the experiment ends.

CoexistLab's total budget is 42 million Danish kroner (about $6.3 million), with 23 million from the Danish Innovation Fund, 11 million from the EU's Horizon Europe program, and the remainder split between Carnegie Mellon and the City of Copenhagen.

The first dataset will be released in December 2026. Zimmerman emphasized that, regardless of outcomes, all data will be made openly available to researchers worldwide. That commitment reflects CoexistLab's identity as a public research project: its goal is to produce public knowledge, not competitive advantage for any single institution.