Working definition. Responsibility is the capacity and obligation to respond: to connect one’s choices to their consequences and remain available for repair.
Inherited meaning
Moral and legal traditions often organise responsibility around causation, intention, and control. Technological systems complicate all three by distributing action across designers, institutions, operators, and tools. Yet distributed causation does not have to mean dissolved accountability.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI encourages the passive voice: content was generated, a score was produced, the system decided. Responsibility restores the subject. Whoever frames the goal, selects the output, deploys the system, or benefits from its use holds part of the answerability. Capability may be delegated; responsibility must be designed.
What changes in practice
Name owners before launch, not after harm. Document who can stop the system, how affected people can contest it, and what repair looks like. Never let the complexity of the production chain become an alibi.