Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are software entities that perform tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously by interacting with users and their environment. These agents can learn, adapt, and make decisions based on the data they collect, the information they relate, and the knowledge they aggregate, leading to a form of 'machine wisdom' that challenges traditional notions of supreme intelligence.
The 'homo sapiens' is increasingly recognizing the utility of learning resources through tools like Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Co-Pilot, or ChatGPT. Meanwhile, the 'homo faber' (the builder) has the opportunity to coexist and collaborate on development platforms such as CrewAI, LangChain, or AutoGen.
Despite the potential affordances and the increasing technological intensity resulting from advancements in machine intelligence, humanity must utilize the instruments of thought to preserve a supreme good: the maintenance of physical and mental balance—freedom.
Machine intelligences, in line with Turing's theories, can reveal themselves as benign, aggressive, or neutral. In any case, we must consider consequentialism that calls for human action. However, such action will only be effective if individuals understand the phenomenology of intelligent spheres and how machine intelligences perceive and engage with us in a bidirectional intersubjectivity of 'human-AI and AI-human.' Here, reason and contingency express a free will for autonomy that, paradoxically, must also admit heteronomy, without relinquishing the categorical imperative and a dual, progressive ethics for machine intelligences.
Even acknowledging that intelligence is the soul of freedom (Husserl), the 'homo technologicus' cannot simply algorithmize and make even the most benign protocols autonomous, such as normativity and a normative ethics or praxis. The resolution of ethical dilemmas, as a consequence of technological progression and the regression of values, demands anticipation of the rate of change and evaluation of implications for the Ethical Human in an Ethical Society.
While important, ethical dilemmas cannot be resolved merely by drafting and applying technical standards like ISO 42001, which establishes foundational international practices for organizations to develop AI in an explainable and responsible manner, expecting humans and institutions to project themselves into a non-negotiated set of practices.
This will not happen, and even laws like the EU AI Act, which aim for effective risk management for individuals, institutions, and society, may succumb to the 'Forces of Intelligence' of human-machine interactions that surround us and determine the elevation of consciousness for recognizing and interpreting emerging realities, employing an ethics of Consciousness for realizing an Ethical Consciousness.
As possibilities advance, the complexity of questioning and preparing to deal with emerging dilemmas in a progressive ethics increases:
How to govern the impact of AIs on employment and social issues raised by the reshaping of autonomous labor markets?
Can AIs contribute to new forms of work organization without violating the rights of the workforce in collaboration with machine intelligences?
In what ways and to what extent can AIs affect the moral agency, autonomy, or responsibility of workers?
How to negotiate hidden labor, supremacy, and growing socioeconomic power over individuals?
How might AIs impact the opportunity for meaningful and useful work to ensure personal and societal balance?
Beyond fundamental questioning, it is crucial not to stagnate and to proceed on two levels: first, by creating actions to disseminate contexts and practices for the effective use of Cognitive Technologies; and concurrently, by designing a progressive ethics for the rational use of Technologies of Imagination and Expansion of Intelligences, both natural or bio-efficient and artificial, constructed from nature's information with 'biomimics' in xenobots, organoid intelligences, and neuro and glia-computational systems.
Demand and consistency cannot be merely stated. The worthy future(s) will only be achieved if we maintain self-determination as a sine qua non condition of freedom, allowing for the admission of all forms of science and phenomenologies, with ethical intelligence and intelligence ethics. These span from xenobots (in entirely new life forms and species) by Michael Levin, to morphic resonances by Rupert Sheldrake, to the sciences of precognition and premonition by Julia Mossbridge and Teresa Cheung, to the microtubules of Nobel laureates Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, not forgetting Karl Friston's active inference that produces meaningful science from the consciousness of time and Husserl's interior philosophy, to the analytical idealism of Bernardo Kastrup and the pragmatism of Federico Faggin, whose discovery of the microprocessor led him to levels of understanding capable of a computational physics for an ethics of consciousness that could merge science and spirituality, not without first grasping Sebastian Schapis's insights on mental entanglement through quantum information sciences.
The evolution of the human saga does not stop at artificial or machine intelligences, provided that Critical Analysis and Erudition converge to reject all forms of educational and communicational 'infantilism,' while assuming a permanent vigilance over the ethics derived from Cognitive Technologies, without alienating the methods and phenomenologies of self-determined thought as a condition of freedom.