The relationship between responsibility and subjectnessless – a problem in the automation of management decisions

Abstract

Objective: To uncover the prerequisites for managerial subjectnessless and ways to maintain agency in the context of developing AI technologies.

Methods: Using materialistic dialectics, analysis, a systems approach, and a thought experiment.

Results: The activities of a workforce manager are examined through the prism of an subject who must be justifiably responsible for the decisions made. It is shown that an individual who can arbitrarily position themselves in relation to their own responsibility strives to minimize it, which indirectly leads to a loss of agency – and this development path for legal entities has been regularly reproduced throughout history. Subjectnessless, as a lack of will and unreflective adherence to an algorithm, inevitably leads to an enterprise's vulnerability to competitors. However, the economic subjectnessless of managers in modern conditions is increasing due to the automation of some management decisions. AI managers are essential both for the speed of decision-making and for the ongoing resolution of optimization problems.

Conclusions: the development of AI in the near future will allow enterprise managers to retain agency only as individuals transforming the inertial development of the production structure under their control into upward development. The highest expression of strategizing becomes the definition of the enterprise's goals: when the subject-manager must assume responsibility for decisions that are suboptimal within the framework of existing forecasts. However, this approach also has its limitations: when AIs are better able than individual managers to consider the needs of society and analyze its development prospects as a whole, are better able to predict trends in the technosphere, and possess a broader outlook, then the contradiction between optimization and innovative approaches can be fully realized with the help of AI. The intentions of human managers, however, can be viewed as chaotic manifestations of emotions.