Artificial intelligence and the imperative of responsibility: Reconceiving AI governance as social care

The accelerating development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has generated acute and interlinked challenges for social trust, responsibility ascription, and governance. While today’s AI tools lack the type of agency that can bear responsibility, they are deployed in ways that create novel configurations and social appearances of agential power. That is, they allow new things to be done by us, for us, and to us, in ways that do not easily fit our existing practices for governing moral and legal responsibility. This is commonly referred to as the problem of AI ‘responsibility gaps’. We confront this challenge by framing normative responsibility in a new way: not as a fact about agents to be discovered, nor a set of criteria that responsible agents must satisfy, but as a relational practice of social care in the exercise of power, that responds to others’ vulnerability to our power. Drawing from examples in steamboat engineering, consumer finance, and environmental governance, we highlight how responsibility gaps have historically generated the moral and political imperative to construct new forms of responsible agency to balance novel agential powers, of which AI is merely the latest iteration.