Moral Responsibility

Our situation, vis a vis artificial intelligence, continues to deteriorate (AI Security Institute 2025; Soares 2026). The more dire the situation, the greater the pressure to hold someone accountable. It may be futile to imagine that we will ‘get through this’ and then have an Eichmann in Jerusalem moment where we put the billionaire barons of AI on trial. But we should prepare for it. In the preparation we may develop the courage to deal with the circumstances of today.

Holding the creators of AI responsible is a worthy goal, even if everything turns out OK and the world is a better place. Let them receive the Nobel prizes they will so rightly deserve!

If holding the AI oligarchs (Reich 2026) accountable for our demise is by definition impossible (who would host the event, the robots?), why bother starting? One reason why we should (must) do this is that we will never get to the stage of holding the creators of AI responsible for their atrocities until we confront our own complicity and moral responsibility for letting things get so far. And that we can start immediately.

Although we rely on the work of Friedländer for our analysis of the Holocaust in this book, there is good reason, if we are considering atrocity, to look no further than the work of Hannah Arendt (1996a, 1996b), especially as we are interested in both the particular perfidy of specific “hollow men” running the big AI labs but also confront our own complicity in continuing to enjoy the fruits of AI rather than striving to extinguish it. In this regard, Arendt explores both the depth (the banality of evil among individuals) and the breadth (totalitarian mass societies) of our moral responsibility.

If Arendt was highly successful at helping surface the banality of evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil), she also sought to convey the idea that there is a greater breadth of moral responsibility in the framework for that evil than most people would be comfortable admitting. Eichmann may have been a monster but he was working within and for a system.

Her contention, that responsibility for totalitarian regimes isn’t clustered at the top of the hierarchy but rather spreads far and wide, is one of the most jarring observations from Elements and Origins of Total Domination. In her work we learn that the system was successful because participation was so pervasive.

Rather than a small cadre ordering obedience, everyone was involved. As Liessmann puts it, “The totalitarian aspect of these concepts is revealed in the fact that they are all-encompassing in the truest sense of the term. They are often supported not, as is often assumed, by a party or a leader, but by the masses” (Liessmann 2011, p.130). In Arendt’s words: “Totalitarian movements are mass movements and are, to this day, the only form of organization that modern masses have found and that seems adequate to them” (Arendt 1996. p, 663) translated by Liessmann (2011).

As uncomfortable as that may seem, it explains much about our current situation (e.g., OpenAI has over a billion weekly users), and we will not be able to succeed in taming (or rejecting) the monster we have brought into the world if we don’t admit our own role in the widespread use and rapid evolution of artificial intelligence.

The Promethean shame that we all feel in the presence of technological forms that are beyond our control or comprehension is holding us back from effective action. (NOTE: The link is to an earlier blog post exploring Anders’ thought, including feelings of shame, inversion, and acquiescence, and how it relates to our current situation.) Our acquiescence to becoming antiquated (Anders 1980) should not be seen as a forgone conclusion. It remains within our power to reject these outcomes.

“Central to Anders’ thesis is “Promethean shame,” a multifaceted concept blending philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique. It denotes the humiliation arising from the asymmetry between human production and perception: “The incapacity of our imagination to grasp the enormity of what we can produce and set in motion” (Anders, 1956, p. 267). In the atomic age, this gap manifests as apocalypse without representation; Hiroshima’s victims, Anders notes in Hiroshima ist Überall (1982), died without comprehending their fate, symbolizing collective blindness.” (Panasiuk, 2026, p. 3)

In the face of such enormity, Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI (2021) suggests that we are not obliged to accept the default assumption that because something can be done, it ought to be done: “Rather than asking where AI will be applied, merely because it can, the emphasis should be on why it ought to be applied” (p.226), echoing Leiss’ question: what do we want from an information society (Leiss 1990).

Once we start asking questions like that, we can move on to the hard questions: the ones we need to ask those who are building these systems with seemingly little regard for the life and health of humanity. Why are they doing this? How will they keep this Golem going in the right direction?

In our forthcoming book, and in particular in Chapter 13, “Heart of Darkness,” we tackle the moral and ethical challenges presented by behaviour so depraved (in the Congo and in Silicon Valley) that is beggars the imagination:

“Heart of darkness” describes a tragedy of colossal proportions that arises directly and inescapably from human folly, a tragedy that winds up shattering human ideals and sabotaging the lives and fortunes of both the dominant party and the hapless victims in the ensuing events. Human agents enter carelessly into such obscene ventures, in thrall to nominal ideals which quickly crumble in the effort to realize them, leaving those agents with nothing but the pitiless, cruel, and inhuman actions that will ultimately and inevitably cause bitter regret and shame among later generations. (Leiss & Smith 2027.)

Joseph Conrad’s novella is a warning and it is also an indictment of those responsible. We need to heed that warning, and act on that indictment as it pertains to AI developers today. As we state at the beginning of Chapter 13:

We will seek to show that the risk of losing human control over the applications of artificial intelligence, as well as the risk that artificial superintelligence could attain the capacity to eliminate the human species, opens the door to the heart of darkness for contemporary society. Failure to deal adequately with these two risks, through effective regulation and international agreements, would surely poison the lives of the last generation of human beings to occupy this planet. (Leiss & Smith 2027)

We the users of AI, the citizens of democratic countries, must face up to our moral responsibilities. But when we have done that, we will be able to give full voice to the challenge of reining in and holding responsible the hollow men of the AI labs.

Those who believe this, who apparently include the CEOs of the most powerful AI firms in the world, are Conrad’s hollow men from the heart of darkness, for despite the power represented by their corporate leadership, they believe that they are helpless to stop or even slow down a process which they themselves once initiated. In other words, they believe that, despite making decisions every day to advance this process, they, like all the rest of us, are just being swept along in the floodwaters of technological necessity. They have in effect abdicated all personal responsibility for their own actions. They are the hollow men. (Leiss & Smith 2027)

And for what? Is this a bargain we can turn down? When riches lure us to the edge of a cliff?

We argued earlier that no conceivable benefit to humanity, not even the most fanciful and rewarding (such as a cure for cancer), can justify our allowing a small group of investor-owned firms to forge a technology that could lead to human extinction. To do so takes all the rest of us on this planet, unwittingly, into the heart of darkness, a zone where the lure of great benefits blinds us to the possibility, however small, that we might instead encounter a horror like no other we can imagine. And the worst part of all would be the realization that there was no necessity in the matter, for it will have been an act of collective suicide. (Leiss & Smith 2027)

We need to stop them, and get humanity off this catastrophic voyage to the heart of darkness. To do so will require investing in ourselves and our moral imagination. Schwarz summarizes Anders work in this way:

Anders’s work nevertheless also offers the glimmer of a positive humanist avenue from which to resist the techno-apocalypse for humanity: rather than trying to catch up to the standard of functional progress of technology, we should instead develop our human capacity for moral imagination so as to overcome the Promethean slope (Anders, 2010: 271–4). In order to build the world we wish to live in as humans in relation with other humans and our artefacts, we must exercise and build our capacity for that which is a human capability – the ability to relate morally and empathetically to others in the world, lest it atrophies completely. Rather than let matters of the soul – our sentiments and feelings – shrink proportionally to the growth of our technological products, Anders enjoins us to make an active effort to hone and expand our ability to feel; to deliberately stretch and flex our potential for moral imagination (Anders, 2010: 273–4). (Schwarz 2019, p. 107).

Are we ready? If so, we need to be afraid. Really afraid. But afraid in the fearless, stirring, and loving way that Anders inspires:

The Courage To Fear: When speaking of the “imagining of nothingness,” the act meant is not identical with what psychology imagines to be imagination, for I speak of fear, which is the imagining of nothingness “in concreto.” Therefore we can improve the formulations of the last paragraphs by saying: it is our capacity to fear which is too small and which does not correspond to the magnitude of today’s danger. As a matter of fact, nothing is more deceitful than to say, “We live in the Age of Anxiety anyway.” This slogan is not a statement but a tool manufactured by the fellow travellers of those who wish to prevent us from becoming really afraid, of those who are afraid that we once may produce the fear commensurate to the magnitude of the real danger. On the contrary, we are living in the Age of Inability to Fear. Our imperative: “Expand the capacity of your imagination,” means, in concreto: “Increase your capacity of fear.” Therefore: don’t fear fear, have the courage to be frightened,⁴ and to frighten others, too. Frighten thy neighbor as thyself. This fear, of course, must be of a special kind: 1) a fearless fear, since it excludes fearing those who might deride us as cowards, 2) a stirring fear, since it should drive us into the streets instead of under cover, 3) a loving fear, not fear of the danger ahead but for the generations to come. (Anders 1962).

That quote comes from a talk that Gunther Anders gave in Berlin, to a group of students. After the talk was over, the students asked for something that they could take away and refer to in their action against nuclear weapons. The theses were a result of that request, later translated and published in the Massachusetts Review, in 1962. Anders call to action is even more salient today and we can only hope that we live up to his words.

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