From Disruption to Agency: AI, Computing Cultures, and the Future of Digital Ethics

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is often presented today as an unprecedented technological disruption, but its central ethical questions—concerning automation, human agency and flourishing, accountability, access, labor, and environmental cost—have deep roots in the histories of computing, science, communication, and technology. Drawing on more than a decade of my own work in AI, including computer vision, energy-efficient computing, empirical software engineering, and agentic coding, as well as longstanding work in computing history and the digital humanities, this talk places generative and agentic AI within a broader pattern of technological and cultural change. As David B. Dennis and I argue in our forthcoming Taylor & Francis book, History of Computing and Its Cultures: From Calculating to Convergence, we have already passed through a cultural singularity: computation has converged with communication, media, scholarship, work, and everyday life well before the still-anticipated arrival of a technological AI-based singularity. From this perspective, digital ethics cannot be reduced to correcting biased models or adding safeguards to individual applications. It must ask how computational systems have reshaped cultures over the millennia, redistributed agency, amplified or diminished human capabilities, consumed material resources, and altered what societies expect people to know and do. The central challenge, therefore, is not whether AI will disrupt established practices—it is already doing so and will continue to do so—but whether we can direct that disruption toward human flourishing while retaining the knowledge, judgment, and responsibility needed to remain meaningful agents in an increasingly computational culture.