The Age of Negligence? Due Care, Attention, and Responsibility under Accelerated and AI-Mediated Action
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Contemporary institutions can expand the volume, speed, complexity, and technological delegation of action without proportionately expanding the conditions needed to perform those actions with due care. This review examines whether recurrent failures of attention, verification, maintenance, correction, and responsibility across heterogeneous domains justify a broader diagnosis of an “age of negligence.” It uses a theory-driven integrative review strategy, combining philosophical work on negligence and due care with safety science, patient-safety and workload research, infrastructure maintenance, reproducibility studies, digital-attention research, and empirical and normative work on human–AI collaboration. The evidence does not support a uniform historical decline in careful action. Deterioration appears in some settings, while high-reliability organizing, open-science practices, improved public services, and well-designed human–AI collaboration provide important counterexamples. A more defensible synthesis concerns the institutional conditions under which due care is feasible. Five comparison dimensions recur across the reviewed literatures: perceptual-epistemic availability, verification and error detection, corrective control, capability maintenance and learning, and answerability. Attention matters when interruption or overload degrades task-relevant monitoring; AI matters because delegated outputs can scale faster than competent verification and corrective authority. The article therefore treats AI as a stress test for older problems of institutional reliability rather than as their origin. It concludes with a bounded reconstruction of eulabeia as caution, measure, and responsible restraint, while rejecting a causal shortcut from secularization to moral decline. “The Age of Negligence?” remains an interrogative diagnosis, not an empirical conclusion.
Author: Huerta Castillo, Israel
Institution: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225592415