Talk of “agentic AI” can illuminate real changes in technical delegation, but it can also move agency-talk toward artificial systems while human and institutional actors recede from view. This paper argues that responsible AI governance requires neither machine personhood nor metaphysical quietism, but fitting individuation: naming AI systems enough to govern, contest, authorize, and repair their uses without personifying them beyond warrant. On this account, AI systems are not autonomous moral agents, but socio-technical deployments through which judgment, authority, risk, and responsibility flow. The central question is therefore not simply “Is the AI an agent?” but “Where must judgment, contestability, and answerability be located for this deployment to remain governable?” I propose three adequacy tests: identity credentials sufficient for governance, delegation-with-answerability, and responsibility-flow mapping. These tests distinguish legitimate technical delegation from agency laundering, explanation theatre, and nominal human oversight. The result is a modest metaphysical account of AI: thick enough to locate responsibility, light enough to avoid machine mystification, and practical enough to guide institutional governance.
Many think that we should respect humans and not AIs. This paper shows that this approach runs into trouble in “ambiguous spaces,” where we can’t tell whether someone is an AI. We can either extend respect to ambiguous agents, or withhold respect from them. Either approach comes with significant costs. We call this dilemma the contagion of disrespect. Extending respect ties our hands, and incentivizes people to deploy ambiguous AIs against us. Withholding respect risks blocking some humans from respect, and risks creating spirals of disrespect.
Hi there, I’m Brandon Yip. I’m an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Singapore Management University. My research covers a range of interconnected questions in moral psychology, epistemology, and meta-ethics, with an eye to how these connect with... Read More →
The use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) by children demands critical examination over whether and how the technology affects their cognitive development. Given the growing empirical research showing the impacts of GenAI on human cognition, this paper aims to philosophically examine the threats that this technology may pose to children’s development as practical reasoners, given the importance of childhood and adolescence in developing this central capability. This paper first outlines and justifies the use of the Capabilities Approach and the particular focus on the central capability of practical reason. I then explore empirical research which shows that GenAI may put downward pressure on children’s ability to reach the necessary threshold for practical reason. I then argue that, due to the pressures it places on this capability, if children are unable to reach the necessary threshold for practical reason due to cognitive offloading and delegation to GenAI, they may be at risk of becoming dependent on GenAI tools and the corporations that control them. Such dependency would raise two important critiques of the adoption of GenAI in childhood and education: first, prudential critiques where the agent’s own interests are undermined; second, political critiques where unjust social forces are reinforced and exacerbated.
