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Abstract

Humanity’s future will include greater integration with different kinds of increasingly autonomous and interactive technological systems. Doing so is likely to confront us with reasons to adapt some of our currently accepted concepts and practices. We contend that among these is included a persuasive pragmatic reason to undertake just such an adaptation in our concept of collective responsibility and the practices attendant to it. The core of this pragmatic reason lies in how it allows us to respond to the issue of possible techno-responsibility gaps, which have been at the center of much of the attention and debate surrounding autonomous technologies. Our guiding thought is that we ought to consider a spectrum of interactiveness as an additional parameter when confronting such possible gaps. We contend that as one proceeds along the spectrum of increasingly depthful interactivity between human and machine, individual responsibility fails to provide the tools necessary for fully accounting for the role of responsibility, and we turn to the idea of collectivizing responsibility in such cases. We will claim that collectives can be instantiated by some agent-non-agent relationships, with the central condition being that this relationship reaches a meaningful level of interactivity. We take a requirement for this to be that the technology in question occupies a particular space upon an Interactive- Autonomous Spectral Field. Without having to single out specific humans in the loop or consider machines as bearers of responsibility, we may consider humans and the machines they interact with as a morally-relevant collective.

DOI

10.30658/hmc.10.4

Author ORCID Identifier

Niël Conradie: 0000-0002-1916-3171 ORCID logo

Hendrik Kempt: 0000-0002-5886-2987 ORCID logo

Nils Freyer: 0000-0002-4460-3650 ORCID logo

Saskia Nagel: 0000-0001-9657-5121 ORCID logo

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