The Flesh of Cost: Why Artificial Intelligence Cannot Bridge the "Responsibility Gap"

This paper re-examines the "responsibility gap" in artificial intelligence ethics from an ontological perspective rather than the conventional epistemological approach. We argue that responsibility attribution requires a multi-layered necessary condition framework: Layer 1 (Ontological: existential cost), Layer 2 (Epistemological: normative responsiveness), Layer 3 (Affective: moral self-reflection), and Layer 4 (Social Inheritance: posthumous accountability). This paper focuses exclusively on Layer 1, demonstrating that existential cost—mortality, vulnerability, irreversible change—constitutes the necessary ontological condition for responsibility. Responsibility requires that agents bear the existential stakes of their decisions: only beings who can die, suffer, and have their existence irreversibly shaped by their choices can provide ontological guarantees for irreversible consequences. AI systems can fully backup, rollback, and copy their computational states at the logical level; energy dissipation at the physical level has no intrinsic connection to the semantic content of decisions. Moreover, even after AI "dies," it leaves no posthumous accountability—no reputation to be held accountable, no legacy to be claimed, no historical evaluation to bear. This ontological asymmetry constitutes the unbridgeable responsibility gap. The English version introduces a four-layer necessary condition framework for responsibility, the "posthumous accountability" argument, upgraded rebuttals to neuromorphic computing objections, and a shift from "accountability" to "entitlement confirmation."