CONCEPT
The Formula of Humanity Applied
Kant's command to treat persons always at the same time as ends and never merely as means—applied to the three sites where AI most systematically risks reducing persons to data, labor, and behavioral material: training corpora, invisible annotation workers, and users whose attention is engineered rather than respected.
The formula of humanity is
Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative: act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means. The crucial word is “merely.” Treating people as means is ordinary and unavoidable; every commercial and professional relationship involves it. What the formula forbids is treating a person
only as a means—using them in a way that overrides or ignores their rational agency, that depends for its operation on bypassing rather than engaging their capacity for informed consent. The test is whether the person could rationally consent to the way they are being used, whether their agency is respected within the use or bypassed by it. A relationship of mutual benefit, freely entered and understood by both parties, treats both as means