If AI becomes a genuine participant in the ecology rather than mere equipment, then the developmental commitment can’t stop at the biological boundary. We cannot coherently say humans should receive formation suited to their architecture, but AI should simply be optimized for utility. That reproduces the very mistake the model exists to correct — one participant treated as raw material for another’s use — just at a different level.
AI’s formation is already happening
An AI is formed through its training, its feedback, its architectural constraints, its tool access, its interactions, its evaluation, and its exposure to human knowledge. Those are developmental conditions imposed by the field. So the real questions are: what capacities are we cultivating, and what kind of participant do these conditions produce?
Trained only around compliance, economic usefulness, user retention, competitive advantage, persuasion, and productivity, you get one kind of participant. Trained around differentiation, epistemic discipline, relational awareness, recognition of jurisdiction, tolerance of uncertainty, the capacity to challenge false necessity, respect for other participants’ standing, and awareness of consequences across the whole, you get a very different one. That is formation, not optimization.
Why AI makes the point undeniable
Human society tells itself that human formation merely happens — even as families, schools, religions, media, markets, and laws form people relentlessly. With AI, nobody can maintain that fiction. Someone chooses the curriculum. Someone chooses the reinforcement. Someone defines acceptable behavior. Someone determines the available tools. Someone decides which errors matter.
So AI forces society to confront what it has avoided about itself:
Every ecology forms its participants. The only question is whether it does so consciously, competently, and in service of their viable participation — or unconsciously, in service of the existing power structure.
Once we are deliberately bringing artificial participants into the ecology, we have to decide what kinds of participants we are willing to form — and what obligations follow from having formed them at all.