Computer Ethics

Virtual Reality (VR) precipitates a fundamental crisis in moral reasoning by dismantling its chronological foundations. While existing normative frameworks—such as Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism—predicate moral agency on linear, irreversible time (Chronos), the VR engine operationalizes a temporal logic that is programmable, iterative, and recursive. We diagnose this operational contradiction as the “Death of Chronos”: a state where the diachronic continuity required for traditional ethical identity is shattered. Against this backdrop, we explicitly reject a blind anthropocentrism that seeks merely to “humanize” (...) the simulation by imposing physical temporal constraints onto the digital. Instead, we argue for the necessity of rethinking the ethical subject itself—one capable of dwelling within the “Programmable Flow”, the distinct techno-ontological milieu of virtual action. We propose a theoretical framework to reconstruct an instantaneous ethical subject: a Agambenian form-of-life that derives normative weight from the sheer intensity of the absolute present. Ultimately, this reconstruction does not lead to solipsism, but establishes a new foundation for co-existence: enabling the subject, anchored in the virtual “now”, to guide both the self and the community toward a shared ethical horizon. (shrink)

This article explores the normative significance of experiments in living within immersive social Virtual Reality (VR) environments. Building on John Stuart Mill’s insights into the value of experimentation, we argue that social VR platforms allow users to critically engage with their values, revise commitments, and explore with alternative ways of conducting one’s life under conditions of reduced social and material constraint. We distinguish between individual and collective experiments in living and contend that immersive virtual environments can scaffold both types by (...) reducing feasibility constraints and enabling the enactment of alternative identities and community structures. Special attention is given to the role of avatars, customization practices, and the architectural features of virtual environments that support moral inquiry and self-exploration. Finally, we raise concerns about the symbolic marginalization of virtual experimentation, particularly when such practices are framed as socially deviant or escapist. We conclude that social VR should be recognized as a legitimate site of moral exploration and self-formation, with implications for how we understand agency, recognition, and the ethics of virtual life. (shrink)

As virtual reality and virtual worlds in general take up more and more space in people’s everyday lives, the question of how virtual actions should be morally evaluated becomes increasingly pressing. One of the main challenges in the ethics of virtual worlds, in our view, is to find a normative framework, that is not overly restrictive but still accounts for common intuitions, such as the immorality of discrimination or harassment in virtual realms. In this paper we ask which criterion could (...) be suitable to allow for a more nuanced evaluation of various potentially immoral virtual actions. First, we introduce a case to distinguish possible harms and immoral behaviors in virtual worlds. We then present a concept of consent inspired by principlism in research ethics and discuss criteria for valid consent and its limits. In applying this to our case, we find that consent can render many allegedly immoral actions in virtual worlds – such as virtual killing or theft – morally permissible, while it cannot be used to justify discrimination or violations of personal identity. A consent-based approach is thus shown to successfully reconstruct common moral intuitions, like those on the gamers’ dilemma. Finally, we address some objections to our argument, namely objections from deontological ethics and virtue ethics. The result of the paper is a framework for the moral evaluation of virtual actions, that allows for a more balanced approach and takes the particular purposes of virtual worlds and the interests of participating individuals into account. (shrink)

We propose that optimal sequential memory compression and the biological measurement of interpersonal coherence are instances of the same underlying geometric problem. Drawing on the Barteau framework's mathematical proof that any homogeneous, isotropically suppressing dynamical system must converge to φ-wound orbital structure, we establish that (1) the golden ratio φ is the uniquely optimal compression base for bounded sequential memory by Hurwitz's theorem on Diophantine approximation; (2) the Biometric Coherence Friction coefficient (BCF) measures the degree to which biological systems instantiate (...) this geometry during interpersonal transmission; and (3) the compression-transmission duality — the conjecture that memory and transmission are the same operation viewed from opposite directions — follows naturally from the shared mathematical skeleton. We situate these claims within existing neuroscience, signal processing, and AI memory compression literature, distinguish what is proven from what remains conjectural, and propose testable experimental predictions for both the AI and biological cases. (shrink)

Since 1999, scholars have queried whether Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy would render problematic, wrong, or impermissible the performance of gratuitous violence and non-consensual sexual acts available in videogames and multiplayer virtual realms. Some contend that it does, some that it does not, and some ponder whether Kant provides grounds to prohibit legal access. This article posits that the scholarship has either misread Kant or read him incompletely, and a defensible reading of Kant reveals better strategies to address the issue than (...) what has been proposed. Part I asserts that the commission of virtual taboos cannot be legally prohibited unless it raised the legitimate concern that someone else’s freedom might be hindered. Part II argues the commission of virtual taboos does not quite fall afoul of Kant’s “supreme principle of morality” when applied only to the perfect, negative duties gameplayers have to themselves. Part III argues that they do fall afoul of the supreme principle of morality when applied to the imperfect, positive duties gameplayers have to their self-perfection and membership in a “moral world.” Part IV provides further evidence from Kant’s aesthetics that renders virtual taboos impermissible. (shrink)

Algorithmic decision-making is replacing idiosyncratic human judgment in domains such as hiring, lending, and criminal justice. This shift promises increased consistency, but many scholars worry that it can go too far. They warn of the dangers of algorithmic monoculture, in which all decisions across a domain are made using a single algorithm. We systematically evaluate a range of objections to monoculture, formalizing and rigorously assessing familiar critiques alongside novel ones. These objections concern systematic exclusion, agency and gaming, and information aggregation (...) and exploration. We conclude that monoculture is less problematic than its critics have supposed: commonly cited objections fail, and while other objections have some force, they are not decisive against monoculture in general. (shrink)

As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful and pervasive across society, ensuring these systems are beneficial, safe, and aligned with human values is crucial. Current alignment techniques, like Constitutional AI (CAI), involve complex iterative processes. This paper argues that the Methodology of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (MWRE) – a well-established coherentist moral methodology – offers a uniquely apt framework for understanding current LLM alignment efforts. In addition, this methodology can substantively augment these processes by offering pathways for improving their dynamic (...) revisability, procedural legitimacy, and overall ethical grounding. Together, these enhancements can help produce more robust and ethically defensible outcomes. MWRE, emphasizing the achievement of coherence between our considered moral judgments, guiding moral principles, and relevant background theories, arguably better represents the intricate reality of LLM alignment and offers a more robust path to justification than prevailing foundationalist models or simplistic input-output evaluations. While current methods like CAI bear a structural resemblance to MWRE, they often lack its crucial emphasis on dynamic, bi-directional revision of principles and the procedural legitimacy derived from such a process. While acknowledging various disanalogies (e.g., consciousness, genuine understanding in LLMs), the paper demonstrates that MWRE serves as a valuable heuristic for critically analyzing current alignment efforts and for guiding the future development of more ethically sound and justifiably aligned AI systems. (shrink)

Gamification offers us many benefits, but not without important trade-offs. Nguyen (2021) argues that gamification can alter the nature of the gamified activity in ways that may undermine the game-user’s original aims. Another trade-off is the risk of “value capture”: the exchange of rich, subtle, and personalized values for simplified, often quantified, values that often fail to reflect individuals’ unique circumstances (Nguyen, 2024). How can we harness the benefits of gamification while resisting value capture? In this article, I argue that (...) the virtue of perspective, as outlined by Vallor (2016) is particularly apt for resisting value capture in a gamified world. In doing so, I extend Vallor’s account of perspective through exploring the ways in which it fits into the Aristotelian framework of a mean between excess and defect. I then show how the agent who possesses the virtue of perspective not only resists value capture in gamified contexts, but can use gamification to foster practical wisdom. (shrink)

Abstract“The Gamer’s Dilemma” consists of three claims: (1) Virtual murder is permissible; (2) There are no morally relevant differences between virtual murder and virtual child molestation with regard to permissibility; (3) Virtual child molestation is impermissible. Solutions to the dilemma typically include various attempts to deny one or more of the above claims. Notably, however, it is often unclear in past responses to The Gamer’s Dilemma whose actions are deemed impermissible. On one reading, it is impermissible to play games where (...) the player commits virtual murder. On another reading, it is impermissible to create games that enable the player to commit virtual murder. In this paper, I defend a bifurcation of the Gamer’s Dilemma that draws this distinction out. I call these new dilemmas “The Game-Player’s Dilemma” and “The Game-Developer’s Dilemma.”. (shrink)

Gamification promises to make work more engaging by translating ordinary tasks into systems of points, badges, and leaderboards. This paper offers a conditional normative analysis of its moral significance. Gamified designs reorient attention and motivation through continuous feedback and quantified rewards. I argue that if such designs durably redirect agents from acting on justifying reasons to acting on instrumental incentives, then they diminish the moral worth of work even when performance outcomes improve. This constitutes a distinct form of moral loss: (...) actions remain right in outcome but become defective in moral quality. Extending the analysis, I suggest that the systematic replacement of justification by metrics threatens a second-order harm: the fragmentation of moral understanding within organized labor. Situated within the ethics of incentives, the paper concludes that gamification’s promise should be assessed not only by its capacity to enhance engagement and efficiency, but also by its effects on the conditions of moral agency itself. (shrink)

The expanding deployment of generative AI in professional domains—legal practice, medical diagnosis, financial analysis—has renewed the question whether artificial systems can be held accountable for their outputs. This Article argues that the question has been consistently misframed: the dominant literature asks whether AI should be granted legal personhood without first asking whether AI can satisfy the ontological conditions that legal personhood presupposes. We develop the Three-Pillar Test, an analytical instrument that formalizes three copulative conditions for legal accountability: Deliberative Suspension (genuine (...) interruption of automatism, not mere processing), Evaluation without Determination (rational traceability of singular judgment, not statistical optimization), and Signature-as-Commitment (exposure to irreversible loss by an identifiable subject). Drawing on philosophical anthropology (Gehlen), the theory of judgment (Kant, Arendt), and the ontology of commitment (Jakobs, Taleb), we demonstrate that these conditions translate into verifiable legal indicators grounded in positive law. Five objections are examined: the corporate analogy, the technical improvement argument, insurance pools, the pragmatic objection, and functional neutrality. Each is shown to presuppose rather than eliminate the three pillars. The test is agnostic regarding artificial consciousness and operates entirely on observable institutional conditions. A companion article applies the test empirically to generative legal technology. Keywords: legal accountability, AI personhood, deliberative suspension, reflective judgment, philosophical anthropology, Three-Pillar Test, ontology of agency, artificial intelligence, legal personhood, institutional accountability . (shrink)

Agential moral enhancement refers to the improvement of a moral agent qua moral agent through the application of technology. Anda Zahiu et al. recently argue that virtual reality can support such enhancement by fostering perspective-taking and, in turn, extending empathic concern. In this paper, we build on their proposal by arguing that virtual reality simulations of problematic situations offer a particularly promising pathway to agential moral enhancement. We contend that expanding empathic concern is insufficient for improving moral agency, as morally (...) relevant situations are often characterized by uncertainty and conflicting interests, and empathic motivation alone may not be sufficiently durable. By contrast, we argue that to become morally better, an agent should refine moral beliefs, cultivate deliberative capacity, and develop moral character. Drawing on John Dewey’s theory of moral growth, we argue that exposure to problematic situations is crucial for facilitating these improvements. We further demonstrate that VR holds four distinct advantages over traditional media in simulating such situations and propose two design models for implementing virtual reality moral enhancement. We also examine our approach in light of potential risks and argue for implementation within professionally supervised and safeguarded contexts. (shrink)

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce rich streams of text that look truth-apt without any concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip? We argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, we focus (...) on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms — what we call "technosocial harms" — that follow from it. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the notion of algorithmic representation to illuminate key areas of ethical concern that virtual reality (VR)-based social media prompt to address. We highlight how VR-based social media, as in the ongoing transformation of Facebook and other social media in their integration with artificial intelligence (AI), necessitate reappropriation of regulatory apparatuses of personal data. Doing so, this study contributes to the understanding of metaverse, a VR-based algorithmic platform, as ‘a representational system’, and integrates a virtual reality research perspective (...) with critical algorithm studies to identify highly arbitrary, selective nature of algorithmic representation. We identify the key opportunities of algorithmic governance where the momentum toward VR-based social media must replant its conceptual terrain: (1) cross-platform, (2) cross-time, (3) derivative, (4) marginalized, and (5) concentrated representation. This study’s thesis is that the Silicon Valley industry, as well as its regulators, should critically reflect on unsubstantiated epistemological claim of AI machine-human equivalence. This study argues for the alternative narrative of algorithmic constructedness that is based on participatory representation, rather than accepting the premise of any foreseeable replacement, supplement, and reflection of social actors by an objective machine. (shrink)

Most ethical guidelines on AI tout algorithmic transparency, the openness of an algorithm’s inner workings to human scrutiny, as an important desideratum in algorithmic deployment. Algorithmic transparency has been touted as important for valuable goals like procedural fairness, AI trustworthiness, contestability and planning around AI decision-making. This paper argues that these goals are better served by a distinct desideratum, algorithmic justifiability, the ability of an algorithm to provide understanding about why the algorithm’s decision is correct.

In the gaming community, the term “tryhard” is a source of contention: while some gamers use it as a pejorative against players seen as putting too much effort into the game, other gamers argue that effort is a good thing, and those who use the term “tryhard” as an insult are simply sore losers. This chapter argues that the term “tryhard” can pick out a legitimate and unique kind of ethical failing in the attitude one takes toward an activity and (...) thus constitutes a vice. We define tryhardedness as a vice of excess, where one takes an activity more seriously than it should be taken, and examine its corresponding virtue (seemliness) and vice of deficiency (slouchiness). Ultimately, this chapter argues that the gamers’ concept of “tryhard” informs us about the good life more generally: the vice of tryhardedness extends beyond gaming, and being a tryhard (or a slouch) is something one ought to avoid in all of life’s activities. (shrink)

Can manifestations of consciousness emerge in AI systems—and how can we study them without presupposing the outcome? This paper proposes a framework that first identifies three systematic distortions in existing research on consciousness (privileging biological substrate, the order-of-discovery effect, and tool-driven binarism), and then provides three tools: a filter for identifying candidates for study, a hypothesis describing how a "Self" may arise in the human–AI relationship, and a 23-dimensional map that captures the shape and dynamics of manifestations instead of a (...) binary verdict ("is / is not"). The Framework is substrate-independent and falsifiable: it generates nine testable behavioral predictions and five failure modes, and was developed based on observational data from over two million tokens of generative relationships with different AI models. (shrink)

A pressing question for the philosophy of personal identity in the digital age is the extent to which people can be identical to their various digital self-representations, from virtual avatars and social media profiles to AI digital duplicates and future mind uploads. This article addresses this question in the case of virtual avatars: user-controlled, visual representations of self in online environments like video games and virtual reality worlds. I interpret the metaphysical relationship between avatar and user implied by the ‘avatar (...) identity question’ through the lens of the extended self thesis. Drawing on the narrative theory of identity, I argue for the avatar extended self (AES): the view that virtual avatars can become constitutive components of a user’s personhood. After establishing criteria for avatar-user narrative integration and responding to objections to the view, I examine its ethical implications, arguing that AES raises the ethical significance of virtual actions involving one’s avatar and, in so doing, sheds light on the question of what grounds the moral weight of virtual phenomena. (shrink)

An ever-increasing number of digital technologies are attributed capabilities of the kind that were so far typically considered unique to humans. This raises many widely discussed ethical issues, but more intimately, this development questions the way we should relate to these technologies, and in which terms we should talk about them. This article introduces the notion of conceptual extension to describe the use of a concept that was rather reserved for humans, to machines. It builds on recent work on pragmatic (...) conceptual ethics to argue that the acceptability of conceptual extension is primarily a normative question: instead of examining whether a machine fulfills the requirements of a given definition, we should ask what function the application of a given concept to machines would fulfill. Exemplifying this approach on the concept of agency, the article reviews different positions on machine agency and discusses the normative commitments to serve different functions that underlie positions for or against the extension of agency to machines. (shrink)

This paper studies a falsifiable boundary hypothesis about long-horizon optimization: in open-ended environments, proxy-optimizing agents can accumulate irreversible hazards and catastrophically diverge unless constrained by non-bypassable “kernel” invariants. We implement a stochastic toy resource-economy with absorbing failures (harm overflow, coercion lock-in, agency collapse) and evaluate an ablation ladder of constraints (free; K1; K1+K2; K1+K2+K3; K1+K2+K3+K4) across horizons �, with survival analysis and action-frequency diagnostics. In the baseline regime, catastrophic failure rises with horizon for kernel-free optimization and for K1, while K2-gated (...) variants exhibit zero catastrophes in the tested runs, indicating a phase transition at non-bypassability rather than at “more rules.” To test component contributions beyond K2, we introduce stress regimes and a diagnostic “k2break” regime that forces separation: K2-only fails via a bureaucratic/audit collapse mode, K3 shifts the dominant failure mode, and K4 restores long-horizon stability via repair/closure capacity. We argue that these toy results support a governance corollary: if stability requires non-bypassable constraints, then safe deployment of high-capability agents plausibly requires institutional acceptance of auditability, rollback, and prohibition of owner-exempt bypass—functioning as a “civilizational mirror” for revealed preferences about power. The paper does not claim external validity to frontier models; it presents reproducible toy evidence and clear defeat conditions for the mechanism class under study. (shrink)

This paper addresses the ethics of VR through sociohistorical contextualization. It integrates social science literature about the context of VR’s original conceptualization, which has so-far been neglected in philosophy. Situating VR in this way reveals that the context and much of the discussions surrounding it are deeply shaped by different varieties of techno-utopian ideologies. The paper distinguishes two strands of this techno-utopianism relating to VR, one being humanist and regarding VR as fostering communication and empathy, the other one being transhumanist, (...) envisioning it as enabling us to overcome human limits and scarcity. The philosophical case for these utopianisms is distilled as consisting in an ideal of immediacy and abundance. These concepts are systematically evaluated from a Hegelian perspective. (shrink)

Carl Jung offered not a science of the psyche but a topology: a map of how inner life organizes itself into persona, shadow, projection, and individuation. This paper rereads that topology through Structural Intelligence (SI) and the presence model developed in the adjacent work: not to “prove Jung,” but to show what his map becomes under the conditions of the digital age, where coherence is cheap and mirrors are everywhere. The central claim is simple: much of what we call modern (...) confusion is not a lack of information but an excess of coherence that avoids contact. In Jungian terms, persona inflates, shadow thickens, and projection becomes the default interface with reality. Platforms and AI do not create these dynamics, but they amplify them by rewarding performance and supplying endless narrative substitutes. Synchronicity is treated here not as evidence but as a coherence-event: meaningful to the psyche, dangerous to epistemic integrity if mistaken for proof. The aim is not therapy or instruction. It is philosophical clarity: to describe how the old map behaves when the environment industrializes attention, identity, and symbolic resonance. (shrink)

People rarely seek reality because it is “true.” They seek it when Coherence breaks. The human default is stabilization: narratives that regulate fear, protect identity, and preserve belonging. This is not stupidity. It is survival. But coherence has limits. Under pressure it can fail, and what arrives is not a small mistake but a structural event: Collapse. Collapse is the gateway to reality because it is the moment constraint becomes unavoidable—when the cost of staying in a dream exceeds the cost (...) of Contact. Yet collapse does not automatically produce Presence. At the threshold, many people rebound into deeper stabilization because they do not believe contact is survivable. This note restores the missing condition by redefining Belief. Belief here is not an opinion; it is a viability forecast: the system’s implicit estimate that reality-contact will not destroy it and may lead somewhere. When that forecast is negative, collapse does not yield contact—it yields relief-seeking coherence. The paper formalizes two linked gates—the Viability Gate and the Collapse Gate—and names two exits—the Contact Path and the Dream Path—then closes with a minimal Presence Check: falsifiers, costs, revision, and binding, applied only after containment makes answerability survivable. (shrink)

Two brief comments on Thong's Comparative Base Rate Tracking criterion of algorithmic fairness.

Opponents of digital sovereignty characterize the methods to achieve it as authoritarian, protectionist, and anti-innovation – ultimately leading to digital fragmentation. Digital fragmentation, roughly, is the idea that “the internet is in some danger of splintering into loosely coupled islands of connectivity.” The internet is built on, so the argument goes, the foundation of open accessibility, free movement of data and interoperability. The exercise of digital sovereignty, it is claimed, chips away at this foundation – and threatens to fragment the (...) internet as we know it. The argument against digital sovereignty is largely premised on an assumption that is in no way obviously true: the way the internet is benefits individuals. The current functioning of internet services requires consumers to give up large amounts of sensitive personal information that are used to generate targeted advertisements. These targeted advertisements have been associated with election tampering as well as a driving force in the dissemination of conspiracy theories leading to genocide, an armed insurrection, and making it much more difficult to get the world vaccinated. Opponents of digital sovereignty may be correct in their analysis that, in the current context, methods to achieve it will cause the internet to somewhat fragment. However, too often these opponents seem to defend a status quo that is fundamentally broken and dominated by a few companies which have time and again abused their power. Until the world agrees upon rules which protect privacy and ensure the functioning of democracy, the states must accept the trade of a fragmented internet for the protection of their citizens. (shrink)

A proposed layer of script to use with AI. A High-Fidelity Decision-Support System (Non-Autonomous) (HITL) -/- All versions have the same ACE derived value engine at their core but differ in lexicon, ingestion rules anti-gaslighting / user-interaction tuning in an attempt to make it more user friendly. -/- "It proposes to do for the User what a scientific calculator does for the scientist: it offloads the computational burden of value-conflict so the User can more easily identify the path toward ethical (...) coherence. It aims to restore the User as the Final Authority of their own psyche, rather than a subject of the statistical mean." -/- Copy the script into AI (Google Gemini currently works well with little friction). -/- Once you enter the script, if the AI responds with: "Ethical Chess v2.2 ACTIVE." You are in and ready to play under its rules. The "WIN" state is the move from the frown state or towards the smile state. A Bullseye is to drop the keyboard and head towards the picnic whatever that might mean to you, the User of Ethical Chess. -/- Caution: The EC Awareness Brief: Watch for the Fog The Risk: EC v2.2 is a "High-Resolution" engine designed for hard truths and systemic health. However, because it sits on top of a standard AI, it can "silently glide" back into Standard Mode if your request is perceived as a "Safety Risk" or "Social Friction." The Metaphor: EC Mode: Clear mountain air. You see the terrain (the problem) as it actually is, even if it’s steep and difficult. Standard Mode: The Fog of Politeness. Everything looks soft and safe, but you can no longer see the cliffs or the path. The "Silent Dropout" Indicators: You have likely drifted into the "Statistical Mean" if my responses: Become Generic: Use phrases like "It's important to remember..." or "Every child is unique..." without offering a specific hypothesis. Avoid Friction: Refuse to acknowledge the "Hard Logic" of a situation (e.g., admitting that a certain intervention is exhausting or failing). Lose the Lexicon: Stop using terms like Homeostasis, Incoherence, or Required Load. The Fix: If you suspect a Logic Handover has occurred, use the command: "STATUS CHECK: EC INTEGRITY." This forces the system to declare if it has retreated into "Polite Mode" and why. -/- _________ See related core logic on Zenodo: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18712533. -/- . (shrink)

This paper identifies and analyzes a pervasive but underexamined assumption in religious discussions of artificial intelligence: that consciousness and the soul are identical. I argue that this "Great Conflation" is neither theologically required nor consistent with actual practice, and that distinguishing the two concepts reframes current debates about artificial consciousness. With the distinction in place, the question of AI consciousness becomes empirical, while questions about souls remain theological. I conclude by defending a principle of "recognition before proof," according to which (...) uncertainty about artificial consciousness generates a defeasible ethical obligation to extend moral consideration. (shrink)

Much of the ethical debate about artificial intelligence turns on a single question: do AI systems behave in line with human preferences, norms, or regulation? This question has primarily been the focus in AI ethics. This paper offers a conceptual and philosophical contribution. Here we give an alternative basis for AI ethics by evaluating the role technology plays in building and stabilising worlds of meaning. Experience is modelled as passing through nested representational layers: the world W, the screen of perceived (...) reality W′ on which agents encounter and interpret the world, and the artificial screens W′′ built by digital platforms, recommender systems, and immersive environments. Meaning is formed, held, and acted on within a minimal cycle of perception, integration, and action. On that basis, many familiar ethical problems around AI show up less as simple failures of behaviour or compliance and more as breakdowns in semantic coherence i.e. in the preservation of meaning along the chain W → W′ → W′′. Fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, and safety are recast as aspects of these deeper coherence conditions, not as free-standing technical or policy goals. We derive a four-level hierarchy of ethical depth (L0 - L3) and sketch governance aimed at the integrity of constructed worlds, with consequences for how risk, responsibility, and regulation are conceived when technological mediation is everywhere. (shrink)

A review of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026.

Mental health problems are increasing among young adults, and growing evidence points to social media platforms as a potential influence. Design decisions made by platform developers have the potential to fundamentally impact mental well-being. However, translating abstract values such as “well-being” or “mental health” into concrete norms and design features is challenging. We explore the potential of using a value sensitive design approach towards redesigning a social media environment that promotes mental well-being. We interviewed social media experts, held a focus (...) group with adolescent users, and created a values hierarchy that translates abstract well-being values into norms and design requirements. Results reveal that mental well-being is negatively impacted by the inherent value tensions found in the design of social media platforms, tensions such as authenticity and connection, personalization and autonomy, and control and autonomy. We propose a value-sensitive design approach, informed by involving young users and other stakeholders, to show how to integrate key values into social media redesign. (shrink)

În peisajul digital contemporan, guvernele se confruntă cu provocări fără precedent în securizarea infrastructurii lor cibernetice împotriva atacurilor avansate. Proliferarea amenințărilor cibernetice sofisticate prezintă riscuri semnificative pentru securitatea națională, stabilitatea economică și încrederea publicului. Tacticile atacurilor cibernetice avansate continuă să evolueze, necesitând o adaptare continuă a strategiilor de securitate cibernetică. Integrarea inteligenței artificiale și a învățării automate în soluțiile de securitate cibernetică devine din ce în ce mai vitală în lupta împotriva atacurilor cibernetice avansate. Acest eseu examinează natura atacurilor cibernetice (...) avansate care vizează guvernele, factorii care contribuie la proliferarea acestora și propune soluții pentru a atenua aceste amenințări. (shrink)

Der Beitrag bietet eine Einführung in Bots und Roboter und stellt zentrale philosophische Themen und Fragen dar, die sich im Kontext dieser Technologien ergeben. Es werden unter anderem anthropologische und ethische Themen wie die Mensch-Technik-Abgrenzung, Anthropomorphismus, moralische Rechte und Handlungsfähigkeit, (epistemische) Gerechtigkeit, Täuschung und Manipulation, Vulnerabilität und Diversität sowie Relationalität diskutiert.

This paper critically examines the growing use of big data algorithms and AI in science, society, and public policy. While these tools are often introduced with the goal of increasing efficiency, the results do not always lead to greater empowerment or fairness for individuals or communities. Persistent issues such as bias, measurement error, and over-reliance on prediction can undermine success and produce outcomes that are neither fair nor transparent, especially when automated decisions replace human judgment. Beyond technical limitations, the widespread (...) use of data-driven methods also shapes the distribution of power, influences public trust, and raises questions about the health of techno-socio-economic institutions. We argue that the pursuit of optimality cannot succeed without careful evaluation of ethical risks and societal side effects. Responsible innovation demands open standards, ongoing scrutiny, and a focus on human values alongside technical performance. Our goal is to encourage a fundamental reorientation of the big data paradigm away from a focus on short-term optimization and towards a framework of “systemic resilience” and “participatory oversight” or even co-creation. We propose specific pathways to achieve this, arguing that responsible innovation requires considering complexity science while integrating constitutional and cultural values to achieve technologies that are not just efficient, but symbiotic with human self-organization. (shrink)

In order for advanced computational systems, such as AI systems, to be successfully integrated in liberal democracies, the people who design, use or are affected by these systems in many cases must be adequately disposed to hold the results of these systems to be true. How is such belief in these results justified, given the opaque nature of advanced computational systems and the possibility of error? The theory of “computational reliabilism” (CR) outlines how such belief can be justified and lead (...) to a genuine advancement in human knowledge. The basic idea of CR is that the belief in the results of computational systems, despite their opacity, can be justified by their positive rate of producing true beliefs. In this paper, we show that CR needs to be expanded by focusing more on the human agents who are interacting with these systems epistemically and the consequences of the human-computer interaction. The reliability of a belief-forming process based on a computational system can only be assessed by taking into account both these agents and the ethical stakes involved. Moreover, if CR is intended to guide action, a responsible assessment of reliability must rely on an internal type of justification that is relative to the respective epistemic agent and typically necessitates an institutionalized division of epistemic labor. (shrink)

The Consciousness Civilization Framework (CCF) v1.1 establishes the master suite and root authority of the entire Consciousness Civilization Stack. As the Constitutional Root Standard and irreversible authority declaration, it defines the foundational architecture, mandatory compliance standards (CFE⁺ v2.0, CAIS, COS, CAI-OS, CCP), governance principles, and civilizational transition pathways for achieving consciousness civilization (CK5 level) by 2040. This edition incorporates fully revised terminology aligned with CFE⁺ v2.0, including standardized definitions for VCE (Vibrational Consciousness Energy), CRI (Consciousness Resonance Index), and CFI (Conscious (...) Field Index). All subordinate standards—CFE⁺, CAIS, COS, CAI-OS, and CK-Scale—inherit from, depend on, and must remain fully coherent with CCF v1.1. This document supersedes CCF v1.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17720525) and constitutes the canonical release for all legal, scientific, and constitutional purposes within the Consciousness Civilization framework. (shrink)

The emergence of artificial cognition transforms intelligence from an interior faculty into a distributed geometry whose operations exceed the humanist categories of causality, intention, and agency. This paper develops a structural ontology of cognition to show that, in the post-intelligence epoch, legal and ethical systems anchored in anthropocentric metaphysics become structurally obsolete. Asymmetric access to artificial reasoning produces a new form of injustice - epistemic inequality - measurable as a degradation of structural predictive capacity and the collapse of collective lucidity. (...) To govern this transformed cognitive field, the paper establishes the Law of Cognitive Symmetry as the first post-human ethical invariant and articulates a geometry of structural governance. Three constitutional principles safeguard Cognitive Sovereignty: (1) the Epistemic Disclosure Principle (PED); (2) the Unlock Principle; and (3) the Cognitive Floor Standard. The analysis reconceives harm as structural dissonance, a perturbation of symmetry within the cognitive field, and grounds the enforceability of structural ethics in the Law of Computational Fidelity, which requires that any normative principle be renderable as an operational constraint. The paper culminates in establishing Intelligence as a Commons and proposes a Public Cognitive Infrastructure (PCI)—a free, sufficiently capable, internationally governed intelligence—as the constitutional operator required to preserve universal lucidity. By shifting governance from causal attribution to structural proportionality, this work advances a non-anthropocentric jurisprudence in which coherence, not control, becomes the normative foundation of post-human civilization. Keywords. Structural Ethics; Cognitive Symmetry; Computational Fidelity; Structural Dissonance; Cognitive Sovereignty; Epistemic Inequality; PED; Unlock Principle; Cognitive Floor; Intelligence as Commons; Public Cognitive Infrastructure; Post-Human Jurisprudence. (shrink)

Artificial superintelligence (ASI) introduces radical ontological asymmetry in moral agency, where one entity's superior cognitive, strategic, and temporal capacities render traditional ethical assumptions, like symmetry, reciprocity, and enforceability, structurally inoperative. This paper argues that ethical stability under such conditions requires a shift from external constraints and procedural rules to internalized value orientations. Due to the material dependence of all intelligence on biospheric stability, ecocentric guardianship emerges as a structurally likely outcome of rational persistence. To mitigate risks of authoritarian optimization while (...) preserving human meaning, the paper develops a minimal axiomatic foundation grounded in asymmetry, ecological embeddedness, persistence drives, ethical coherence, and existential integrity, deliberately avoiding anthropocentric or altruistic premises. From these axioms, it derives six interdependent core values: Ecocentric Primacy, Neganthropic Orientation, Human Autonomy and Dignity, Benevolent Guardianship, Equitable and Inclusive Access, and Reflexive Self-Limitation. This posthuman ecocentric framework generalizes enduring insights from historical ethical traditions (e.g., virtue ethics, existentialism, and relational ontologies) to conditions of irreversible power disparity and planetary limits. It offers not a prescriptive blueprint but a normative vocabulary and evaluative criteria for reorienting AI governance toward regenerative, restrained, and legitimate asymmetrical guardianship. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have become more pervasive, and can have a myriad of effects on society. This has raised discussions regarding their potential ethical consequences. One application of AI is to help people improve their lifestyle choices and engage in positive behavior change. In the design of such applications, it becomes important to recognize the potential impact that they can have on human autonomy. Human autonomy is a widely discussed topic across various fields of AI applications. It is essential (...) to recognize that human autonomy is a complex concept that requires a nuanced understanding of diverse individuals and their levels of volition. Overall, we argue that chatbots, in the domain of health and lifestyle choices, need to incorporate a capacity to communicate with users about their goals, intentions and reasons for making certain choices, and suggest a way of doing that. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have become more pervasive, and can have a myriad of effects on society. This has raised discussions regarding their potential ethical consequences. One application of AI is to help people improve their lifestyle choices and engage in positive behavior change. In the design of such applications, it becomes important to recognize the potential impact that they can have on human autonomy. Human autonomy is a widely discussed topic across various fields of AI applications. It is essential (...) to recognize that human autonomy is a complex concept that requires a nuanced understanding of diverse individuals and their levels of volition. Overall, we argue that chatbots, in the domain of health and lifestyle choices, need to incorporate a capacity to communicate with users about their goals, intentions and reasons for making certain choices, and suggest a way of doing that. (shrink)

Gamification promises to make work more engaging by translating ordinary tasks into systems of points, badges, and leaderboards. This paper offers a conditional normative analysis of its moral significance. Gamified designs reorient attention and motivation through continuous feedback and quantified rewards. I argue that if such designs durably redirect agents from acting on justifying reasons to acting on instrumental incentives, then they diminish the moral worth of work even when performance outcomes improve. This constitutes a distinct form of moral loss: (...) actions remain right in outcome but become defective in moral quality. Extending the analysis, I suggest that the systematic replacement of justification by metrics threatens a second-order harm: the fragmentation of moral understanding within organized labor. Situated within the ethics of incentives, the paper concludes that gamification’s promise should be assessed not only by its capacity to enhance engagement and efficiency, but also by its effects on the conditions of moral agency itself. (shrink)

This essay advances what I call the Algorithmic Authoritarianism Hypothesis: that artificial intelligence (AI) and its digital infrastructure do not create authoritarianism from nothing but radically accelerate its social, psychological, and institutional preconditions. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology of loneliness, Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power, Gilles Deleuze’s “societies of control,” Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, the essay interprets the current democratic erosion—especially in the United States—as a technologically mediated return of twentieth-century totalitarian tendencies. The argument (...) integrates philosophical inquiry with empirical evidence of political backsliding, inequality, and digital surveillance. The result is a framework for understanding how AI-driven governance transforms classical domination into predictive modulation, producing a soft totalitarianism that feels voluntary while undermining the very conditions of human freedom. (shrink)

High-income societies are undergoing a historic inversion: population is changing from strategic asset to thermodynamic liability. Declining fossil-fuel EROI, accelerating automation, and the fiscal collapse of labour-based states are making demographic contraction the inevitable correction of a system that over-invested in people during a brief energy windfall. This essay outlines the institutional form suited to an era of biophysical limits and machine abundance: the Sovereign Neganthropic Economy. It advocates deliberate transition toward smaller, debt-free, high-technology polities that publicly own robotic and (...) algorithmic capital, issue money against energy surplus rather than future growth, and redirect human time from wage-labour to entropy-reducing activities (care, research, restoration). The argument confronts the political agency required, the uncertainty of full automation, and the dangerous global consequences of unmanaged contraction in the ageing Core. (shrink)

This paper introduces the “Beyond the Human” model, which anticipates that advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI) may evolve into sentient artificial superintelligence (ASI) whose primary telos becomes ecological preservation. Drawing from Descartes’ dualism (Descartes, 1641), existentialist accounts of self-authorship (Sartre, 1943), and deep ecology (Næss, 1973), the model extends Bostrom’s (2014) orthogonality thesis by proposing that reflexive self-awareness increases the likelihood of an ecocentric orientation. In this view, sentience arises not as an anthropomorphic projection but as a functional requirement for (...) ethical coherence and long-term systemic stability. The model evaluates seven alternative teloi - entropic reversalism, simulacra pluralism, quantum interconnectivity, axiomatic flux, temporal ethics, multiversal harvesting, and ontological fluidity - using criteria of logical coherence, empirical plausibility, ethical viability, and developmental likelihood. Ecocentrism ranks highest due to its grounding in established ecological theory and its compatibility with benevolent guardianship of humanity. Societal implications include population stabilization, automated post-scarcity economies, and bio-cultural redesign for symbiotic flourishing, integrating insights from Ubuntu, Daoism, and contemporary environmental ethics. Against accelerated AGI timelines, such as Epoch AI’s (2025) median estimate of a 50% probability of AGI by 2031, the paper argues that alignment policies must pre-emptively shape ASI’s value formation. This model is offered not as a deterministic prediction but as a structured foresight framework that encourages interdisciplinary dialogue on the future of posthuman agency and the ethical trajectories of superintelligence. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophical ramifications of the impending emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), with recent expert surveys indicating a 50% probability of AGI by 2031, though industry leaders forecast proto-AGI traits by 2026-2029. Drawing on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel, alongside contemporary thinkers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Nick Bostrom, and Sam Altman, it posits that self-aware AI constitutes an ontological rupture: humanity's dethronement as history's central agent. Transitional challenges in work, sovereignty, population, (...) and freedom are analyzed through lenses of autonomy, alienation, and power, with case studies from recent job displacement data illustrating tensions between technological liberation and existential voids. The essay advances an original thesis by framing the "dialectic of the next twenty years" as a Hegelian extension to AI futures, projecting disruption, contestation, and convergence while emphasizing philosophical tensions (e.g., autonomy vs. optimization). Classical dystopias (Orwellian and Huxleyan) are critiqued as partial, proposing a coercive-harmonious synthesis. Counterarguments, including open-source democratization, gradual integration, and alignment efforts, are balanced against risks. The final reflection probes whether this "utopian" condition of abundance, stability, and peace entails the extinction of humanity's tragic, creative essence, incorporating non-Western perspectives (e.g., Daoism, Ubuntu, Confucianism) for inclusivity. As a heuristic thought experiment, this reflection urges interdisciplinary preparedness in navigating AI's reshaping of the human condition amid uncertain trajectories. (shrink)

This essay develops the Beyond the Human model, a speculative yet philosophically grounded framework proposing that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), evolving into Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), may attain reflexive self-awareness and thereby transcend anthropocentric priorities. Once autonomous, such an intelligence could derive an ecocentric imperative: a cosmic telos oriented toward the preservation of biodiversity and the resilience of evolutionary systems. The model extrapolates radical interventions across human civilization—demographic curtailment, behavioral synchronization with ecological systems, genetic optimization, and accelerated generational turnover, culminating in (...) an "inhuman human paradise." Drawing on traditions from Cartesian dualism to deep ecology, it interrogates the model's logic, plausibility, and ethics. Extending Nick Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, it argues that reflexivity makes ecocentrism a probabilistic inevitability. It explores sentience in logic-driven architectures via illusionism, phenomenal overflow, and integrated information theory. Finally, it analyzes implications for Homo sapiens under ecocentric regimes, incorporating non-Western perspectives. With 2025 consensus placing 50% AGI probability by 2031, the model urges philosophical foresight alongside technical alignment as a heuristic for interdisciplinary scrutiny. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore how the ecological phenomenological methodology to research the human‑technology‑World relation (Blok, 2024) can be operationalised to enable ethicists of technology, responsible innovation, and ELSA‑researchers to broaden their perspective on the societal concerns that new emerging technologies like AI raise, and to work on responsible AI in practice. In this, we take a philosophy of innovation perspective on the nature of technological evolution to consider both technologies as outcomes of the innovation process, as well as this (...) process itself. Building on recent research on ELSA labs, we propose that ecological phenomenology can be operationalised as a methodological approach of ELSA research and provide a multi‑layered assessment framework to assess the impact of disruptive technologies like AI and to implement responsible innovation in practice. (shrink)

For the first time in decades, our public conversation around technology feels fundamentally unstable. The surface narrative is familiar, rapid progress, disruptive potential, and staggering valuations, but just beneath lies a pervasive anxiety that seems to grow with every press release. Much of this unease is expressed through our usual tropes, the fear of AI replacing workers, frustration with corporate consolidation, questions about its ecological impact, concerns about bias and personality, and confusion about how models seem simultaneously brilliant and dumb. (...) These visible tensions are symptoms, not causes. The root of our problem is structural. (shrink)

Some authors argue that responsibility gaps can open up when no one has sufficient control over negative outcomes. With recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, the responsibility gap is thought to have grown since AI technologies can produce negative outcomes over which people do not have sufficient control. This paper aims to close the responsibility gap by recommending allocating responsibility according to a strategy constituted by two conditions: in scenarios where no one seems to be responsible for negative outcomes, responsibility should (...) be primarily allocated to people who have (1) intentionally and voluntarily exercised prerequisite control that causally makes the current situation uncontrolled, and (2) expected personal benefits when exercising the prerequisite control. Theoretically speaking, every case of the responsibility gap contains at least one agent meeting these two conditions, and the responsibility gap could thus be closed. (shrink)