Rory Švarc

Policy and academic discourse around AI often invokes concerns about AI systems’ effects on “human autonomy”. A growing literature also highlights the priority for augmentation, extension, or amplification of human agency. However, as prior authors have pointed out, the concept of ‘autonomy’is vague and heterogeneous; while on the other hand the character of ‘agency’ that is recommended to be augmented remains in need of deeper philosophical attention. We out line four dimensions for evaluating how artificial assistants may affect autonomous human agency, and argue that these distinct dimensions suggest potentially different practical interventions. More specifically, we distinguish choice availability (the size of an agent’s available action set), volitional integrity (the fit between an agent’s actions and her evaluatively endorsed intentions), referential integrity (the accuracy of beliefs whose accuracy the agent takes to matter), and authenticity (the degree to which evaluative attitudes are the agent’s own). We then analyze the prior literature in light of our four dimensions, and argue that our framework allows for a richer analysis of the potential effects that artificial assistants may have on human autonomy. Then, we apply our framework to related discussions on epistemic agency, recommender systems and on human disempowerment from advanced AI, showing that each conflates analytically distinct agency-impairments. From the framework we derive five maxims for the development and regulation of artificial assistants, thereby centering norms of extension of agency.