CONCEPT
The Responsibility Gap
The philosophical and legal problem created when cognitive processes span biological and computational components, making traditional attributions of responsibility to individual human agents structurally inadequate.
Traditional frameworks for assigning cognitive responsibility assume that cognitive agency is located in individual biological persons. The physician is responsible for the diagnosis because her mind produced it. The lawyer is responsible for the brief because her reasoning generated its content. These attributions presuppose that cognitive products emanate from individual biological brains. The extended mind thesis directly challenges this presupposition. If the person-plus-AI is a genuine cognitive agent, the outputs of the coupled system are not straightforwardly attributable to either component alone — they are emergent from the interaction, and the traditional assignment of responsibility to the biological component assumes a picture of cognition that no longer applies.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The problem is not abstract. When an AI-assisted physician endorses a plausible but incorrect diagnosis, or an AI-assisted legal team submits a brief containing hallucinated citations, the question of responsibility is immediate and consequential. Existing professional and legal frameworks hold the human responsible for the outputs of tool use. But tools traditionally produced