Responsibility for the Not-Yet-Born

In The You On AI Field Guide

The responsibility is not comfortable. It does not resolve into a policy recommendation that, once implemented, discharges the obligation. The obligation is ongoing, effortful, and structurally resistant to completion. It requires the continuous exercise of imagination — the willingness to envision consequences that have not yet materialized and to take seriously the interests of persons who do not yet exist. The structural pressures of markets and politics systematically discount the future in favor of the present; the obligation requires resisting those pressures.

Jonas argued that the paradigm of all genuine responsibility is not the contract between equals but the parent's responsibility for the child. The choice of paradigm was deliberate and philosophically loaded. A contract is negotiated between parties who can represent their own interests. Responsibility in Jonas's sense is precisely the moral relation that obtains when one party cannot represent its own interests and the other possesses the power and knowledge to act on those interests' behalf. The parent does not choose to be responsible for the child; the responsibility is constitutive of the relationship.

The parallel to the builder's relationship to the future is exact. The builder who creates tools that reshape the developmental environment of the next generation has not chosen a responsibility — the builder has acquired one. The acquisition is automatic, given with the power to affect conditions that others cannot control. The builder who disclaims this responsibility has not escaped the obligation; the builder has failed it.

The AI transition intensifies the structural absence in a specific way. The twelve-year-old who asks 'What am I for?' has no seat at the table where AI governance is debated, no stock options in the companies building the tools, no voice in standards bodies determining how tools will be deployed in classrooms. The educational environment in which she will develop cognitive capacities, the attentional environment shaping her capacity for sustained focus, the cultural ecosystem where she will learn to think and question — each is being reshaped at this moment by decisions made under conditions of maximum power, minimum foresight, and zero representation for the most affected parties.

Origin

The concept was articulated throughout The Imperative of Responsibility and developed further in Jonas's 1984 essay 'The Concept of Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Foundations of an Ethics for Our Age.' It draws on his philosophical biology, which grounds value in the metabolizing organism, and extends the ground of value temporally into generations not yet alive.

The concept has become foundational to environmental ethics, climate justice discourse, and debates about long-term institutional design. Its application to AI is the specific extension the Hans Jonas volume develops.

Key Ideas

Structural absence. Future generations have no institutional representation by definition — they cannot be present at the decisions that determine their conditions. This is not a contingent failure but a constitutive feature of the temporal situation.

Parental paradigm. Responsibility in its deepest sense is not contract between equals but care for the vulnerable — and the vulnerable include those not yet capable of representing themselves because they do not yet exist.

Acquisition, not choice. The builder does not choose responsibility for the future; the responsibility is acquired automatically with the power to affect future conditions. Disclaiming is failing, not escaping.

Demand-side governance. Current AI governance is largely supply-side — constraining what companies may build. Jonas's framework demands demand-side governance representing future interests: institutional advocates for the not-yet-born.