We are pleased to announce the publication of the 121st paper in the Ken Theory™ series,
titled “Responsibility Before Intelligence: A Civilizational Reframing of AI Ethics.”
This paper is a compact but independent work, reconstructed from the epilogue of the previous 120th paper,
“Reconfiguring Responsibility in Generative AI,”
and developed into a standalone civilizational argument.
Much of today’s discussion surrounding generative AI and AGI implicitly assumes the following sequence:
that responsibility emerges only after intelligence reaches a certain threshold.
This paper challenges that assumption at its root.
The central question is not how intelligent AI systems become,
but how responsibility is structurally generated and distributed within civilization.
The paper examines why contemporary AGI debates tend to misinterpret responsibility,
why so-called “errors” and “hallucinations” should not be reduced to technical defects,
and why responsibility must be understood not as an attribute of agents,
but as a structurally generated property of observational, institutional, and contextual systems.
Drawing on quantum-like structural insights and the Ken Theory™ concept of Responsivity,
the paper proposes a fundamental inversion of the dominant narrative:
responsibility precedes intelligence, not the other way around.
