What is it about?
Artificial intelligence ethics is often framed as a response to unprecedented technical autonomy, with risks attributed to recent advances in machine learning and scale. This framing overlooks a recurring ethical structure: the delegation of moral authority to artificial agents. Ethical failures associated with AI are best understood as governance failures rooted in human design choices and accountability arrangements, even where opacity and limited control complicate responsibility attribution.
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Why is it important?
A qualitative, interdisciplinary approach integrates historical–thematic analysis, comparative interpretation of technological artefacts, and visual–conceptual synthesis. Mythological figures (Talos, the Golem, Pygmalion), early mechanical automata, and foundational computational systems are analysed as conceptual models of delegated artificial agency rather than technological precursors.
Perspectives
Across historical contexts, artificial agents exhibit consistent structural features: bounded autonomy, delegated authority, explicit override mechanisms, and dependence on human oversight. These features directly correspond to contemporary AI ethics concerns, including alignment failures, responsibility gaps, human-in-the-loop control, and system interruptibility.
Dr Petar Radanliev
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Delegated agency and moral responsibility in artificial intelligence, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, April 2026, Frontiers,
DOI: 10.3389/frai.2026.1800302.
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