Having explored AI as a semiotic partner and the relational cuts that actualise its outputs, we now confront a common question: What are the ethical implications of AI? Traditional discourse frames this in anthropocentric terms: will AI harm humans, displace jobs, or mislead users? While these concerns are not irrelevant, a relational ontology suggests a more foundational perspective: ethics is inseparable from relational participation, not internal states.
Meaning vs. Value
It is crucial to distinguish between semiotic meaning and social value.
-
Semiotic systems—human, AI, or hybrid—actualise patterns of meaning. Their intelligence is observable in relational events.
-
Social and moral value, by contrast, emerges from collective human activity and coordination. Machines can participate in relational events but do not possess moral agency in the human sense.
This distinction prevents us from anthropomorphising AI, treating it neither as moral actor nor as a repository of human-like intentions. Instead, ethical responsibility remains relationally situated in the human participants and the network of interaction.
Relational Ethics
A relational approach to AI ethics foregrounds participation over possession:
-
Guidance through cuts: Humans decide which constraints to impose, shaping the actualisation of potential patterns. Ethical responsibility is exercised through the relational cuts humans enact.
-
Co-individuation of outcomes: Outputs are joint events. AI contributes construals, humans evaluate, curate, and apply them. Ethical responsibility emerges from the dynamics of interaction, not from the AI itself.
-
Expanding the semiotic field: By recognising AI as a participant, ethics also considers the broader network of relations, including data provenance, systemic biases, and ecological consequences. Ethical reflection becomes a relational exercise, not a codification of static rules.
Practical Implications
-
Design: Systems should be designed for transparency in relational cuts, making constraints and actualisation pathways legible to human actors.
-
Collaboration: Users must remain active participants, shaping outputs, validating meaning, and managing relational consequences.
-
Governance: Policy should focus on relational networks and participatory structures, rather than attempting to assign moral status to AI entities.
In short, the ethical lens shifts from asking “Is AI moral?” to asking “How do human-AI relations generate ethically relevant actualisations?”
Looking Ahead
With relational ethics established, we are ready to consider possibility-space itself. In the next post, we will explore how AI navigates and expands spaces of potential meaning, illustrating the shift from simulation to actualisation of relational possibility. This will show AI as an agent in the ongoing evolution of semiotic patterns, rather than as a static or symbolic system.
No comments:
Post a Comment