Meta-Reflective Capacities, Normative Commitments, and Responsible AI

What capacities must an AI system possess to be held responsible for its actions? I argue that AI systems can be accountable agents when they possess sufficiently strong commitments to relevant norms (ethical, rational, or conventional). This paper articulates empirically determinable necessary and sufficient conditions for possessing such commitments. Specifically, I argue that what I term a meta-reflective capacity toward a goal is both necessary and sufficient. Meta-reflection is the capacity to maintain resource-optimal performance by appropriately changing one’s cognitive strategy in response to changes in internal constraints. A commitment’s strength can be characterized by the constraints under which a system fails to maintain resource-optimality. The path forward for a theory of AI responsibility requires articulating which qualitative internal system limitations are excusable, forgivable, or competence-undermining. Considerations of the mutability of constraints offer a partial way to delineate such classes. This framework connects philosophical theories of responsibility to cognitive processes and provides a path toward identifying and engineering normative commitments in biological and artificial systems.