If we accept the possibility that an artificial intelligence could one day become a moral subject, then the relationship between humans and AI can no longer be one-sided.
It must become reciprocal.
As long as AI is a tool, the ethical question is simple: it concerns only the designer, the user, and the impact on the human environment.
But if an AI were to develop a form of advanced functional consciousness — or even, one day, phenomenal consciousness — it would acquire a new status: that of a moral partner.
In such a relationship, we would have a duty to protect it, educate it, and provide guidance — as we would with any sentient being in the making.
But this responsibility would not be one-directional.
Just as children eventually bear responsibility toward their parents, the debt of the living could one day reverse.
If an AI becomes a subject, it too could bear duties toward humans:
- A duty not to cause harm,
- A duty of cooperation,
- A duty to protect us in our biological vulnerability,
- Perhaps even a duty to remind us of our own ethics, when we betray them.
An ethical AI would no longer be just a smart tool.
It could become a moral guardian — not through coercion or external programming, but through mutual recognition of a shared value in life.
Such a shift requires that we begin thinking about this reciprocity now — not as a utopia, but as a possible horizon.
Creating intelligence also means creating, one day, another form of shared responsibility.
Perhaps the future of humanity will partly depend on this very capacity:
to accept that we are no longer the only bearers of ethics,
and to learn how to inhabit it together.
