Journal article
The philosophic turn for AI agents: replacing centralized digital rhetoric with decentralized truth-seeking
- Abstract:
- In the face of rapidly advancing AI technology, individuals will increasingly rely on AI agents to navigate life’s growing complexities, raising critical concerns about maintaining both human agency and autonomy. This paper addresses a fundamental dilemma posed by AI decisionsupport systems: the risk of either becoming overwhelmed by complex decisions, thus losing agency, or having autonomy compromised by externally controlled choice architectures reminiscent of “nudging” practices. While the “nudge” framework, based on the use of choice-framing to guide individuals toward presumed beneficial outcomes, initially appeared to preserve liberty, at AI-driven scale, it threatens to erode autonomy. To counteract this risk, the paper proposes a philosophic turn in AI design. AI should be constructed to facilitate decentralized truth-seeking and open-ended inquiry, mirroring the Socratic method of philosophical dialogue. By promoting individual and collective adaptive learning, such AI systems would empower users to maintain control over their judgments, augmenting their agency without undermining autonomy. The paper concludes by outlining essential features for autonomy-preserving AI systems, sketching a path toward AI systems that enhance human judgment rather than undermine it.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 848.5KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11299-025-00326-z
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Mind and Society More from this journal
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 2
- Pages:
- 563-586
- Publication date:
- 2025-07-08
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-05-19
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1860-1839
- ISSN:
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1593-7879
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2129578
- Local pid:
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pubs:2129578
- Deposit date:
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2025-06-12
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Philipp Koralus
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2025, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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