Responsibility, Habit, and Control: Digital Humanism and the Delegation of Critical Functions to Intelligent Autonomous Systems

Book chapter, 2026

As intelligent autonomous systems (IAS) continue to assume increasingly central roles in safety-and mission-critical domains such as transportation, healthcare, finance, and infrastructure management, humans are becoming unable to monitor or intervene in real time. This shift is driven by the speed, data-processing capacity, and adaptivity of IAS. To manage this complexity, a new paradigm is emerging: IAS controlling and monitoring other IAS, a development that introduces at the same time practical efficiency and profound practical and ethical challenges. This article explores the multi-layered delegation of responsibilities within IAS ecosystems, where decisions influencing human lives and well-being are made with minimal human intervention. One often-overlooked consequence of this delegation is the capacity of AI systems to shape and create new human habits, whether through personalized persuasion, behavioral feedback loops, or autonomous decision enforcement. As humans increasingly adapt their behaviors to machine-optimized environments, questions arise about autonomy, agency, and responsibility for resulting behavior changes. Drawing on insights from recent research on responsibility delegation in IAS and on AI-driven habit formation, the article critically examines how responsibility should be distributed across human actors, autonomous systems, and institutions. Framed within the principles of Digital Humanism, I argue for a value-sensitive governance model that ensures transparency, explainability and human oversight even in complex IAS-to-IAS control scenarios. I propose a normative framework for responsibility attribution that accounts for both the technical architecture of IAS networks and the behavioral effects these systems have on human users. The article concludes by addressing the ethical risks of diminished human agency, manipulation through behavioral design, and the need for institutional mechanisms that align IAS operations with fundamental human values.