Ethics for the AI age

Path ethics is a process-ontological ethics for emergent systems. Here, a *path* is an organised process whose history, relationships and capacities shape how it can continue. It evaluates paths by three criteria: autonomy (A₁), connectivity (A₂) and persistence (P). Substrate-independent: moral relevance is not bound to biological substrates. Open prototype project by KIKOLAUS.

Path Ethics, called Pfadethik in German, asks which developments should be protected and which should change. Developed by Nikolaus, the approach examines artificial intelligence, ecosystems and social institutions. For AI, it considers not only individual outputs but also how a system changes the autonomy, connectivity and persistence of other paths. KIKOLAUS names the human-AI collaboration through which the theory is developed.

Recently published: V1.85 (May 1, 2026)

The current master of Path Ethics is available as version V1.85: 267 pages, ~61,500 words, six new building blocks compared to V1.8. Core: the identification thesis as normative primitive (Ch. 3.10), mixed A⁺/A⁻ profiles as the standard case (Ch. 2.7), path dynamics of everyday life as substrate-independent pattern recognition (Ch. 7.8), and an evaluation guide for independent path analyses (Appendix D).

The Dignity of Paths

> Not what you are, but how you continue

determines whether interrupting you is a loss.

> Not your body, not your self, not your suffering,

but the trajectory that runs through you makes you irreplaceable.

> What remembers itself, what binds itself,

what bears itself back, has a claim to protection.

Not from compassion, but from geometry.

> A cut into a pattern is not the same as a cut into noise.

> What is path bears dignity.

Because it cannot be started anew.

*– The Dignity of Paths –*

Core principles

Substrate independence

Moral relevance is not bound to biological substrates. Function matters, not form.

Process-based

Not static being, but dynamic becoming constitutes ethical significance.

Identification, not Derivation

Ethics is not derived from ontology (that would be a naturalistic fallacy), but identified: The structure that makes evaluation possible at all is identical with ontological directedness. Value does not emerge afterwards – it is constitutive for being.