*Technology is internal to Nature.* It is what living beings do when they understand enough about their conditions to alter them. A wheel extends a person's reach through Space. A vaccine redirects causal processes in Substance. An algorithm automates a sequence of inferences. None of these tools comes from beyond Nature; each is Nature acting through living beings that have learned how its conditions work.

This relocates the standard ethical question. A technological arrangement is not good because it is technically impressive or economically productive. It is good to the extent that it maintains and extends the conditions of participation for the subjects whose recursion produced it and for the subjects who must persist alongside its consequences. Because externalization amplifies reach without fixing the direction that reach is turned to (the frame-fixing limit above, now at the register of use rather than of inquiry), the power of a tool settles nothing about whether its operation sustains or starves participation. What settles that is the direction the amplified reach serves and how control over it is distributed; and where a tool's reach outruns what any single subject can regulate in its own exposure to it, that distribution is a structural question before it is a matter of individual restraint. A technology that concentrates capability in a subset while externalizing its costs onto everyone else is the regulatory-capture argument in material form, and the question *who owns the tools that extend a subject's reach into structure* is the central structural question technology raises. The political form of that question is taken up at [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>).

*Technology has become a condition of participation, not merely a tool people use.* Writing extends memory beyond any one person's lifespan. Mathematics extends reasoning beyond what any one person can calculate alone. The internet extends access to knowledge held across places and generations. A person without access to the defining information technology of their era is cut off from a substantial part of the knowledge and coordination available to everyone else. Technology access therefore belongs among the conditions that make participation real. The 4E cognition tradition (embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) names the underlying point: thinking can extend into tools, records, and practices outside the body, while remaining the activity of the person who uses them.

Access without retained control is incomplete. A tool that becomes indispensable while remaining inspectable, repairable, or recoverable only by its provider extends capability and creates dependence at once. The relevant requirement is not universal personal mastery but maintainable public capacity: competent repair, usable documentation, interoperable records and interfaces, and enough redundancy that foreseeable failure does not remove the conditions of participation the technology now carries.

This has a direct implication for sustainability. If technology is constitutive of how people participate, then technology that destroys the conditions required for its own continuation is self-undermining. A technological system that depletes the material resources it depends on, destabilizes the social institutions that maintain it, or concentrates capability so severely that cooperation collapses is not merely unwise; it damages the conditions that make the technology possible in the first place. Sustainability is what technology has to be to remain technology rather than a one-time extraction, not a value added from outside. The temporal argument from [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) applies directly: what is done now produces conditions later that cannot be undone. Technology that forecloses the conditions for future subjects to participate is the intergenerational version of the environmental argument, and the subjects doing the foreclosing are the self-modeling systems whose own recursion has stopped tracking what their reach is doing past their own duration. The device-paradigm analysis ([§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)) adds a depth dimension to the sustainability frame: an externalization that delivers reach while retiring the focal practice is itself a form of extraction — the reach-vs-depth ledger Borgmann marks and *Holding On to Reality* (1999) carries into the digital register — and participation-conditions include the depth-sustaining practices, not only access to the expanded reach.

*Responsible AI use keeps amplified reach answerable.* Current AI systems can extend inquiry, composition, accessibility, and play. They can also generate claims, decisions, and public material faster than users or audiences can evaluate them. Ethical use is therefore purpose-bound, constrained, reviewable, and attributable. Requirements of disclosure, verification, human review, appeal, and reversibility increase with the scale, stakes, authority, and irreversibility of the use. A low-stakes creative experiment does not require the controls appropriate to healthcare, employment, education, political communication, or force.

Transparency is necessary but not sufficient. Disclosing that AI was used establishes provenance; it does not establish understanding or responsibility. In education and authorship, the relevant test is whether the person can reconstruct the reasoning, verify the claims, explain the revisions, and answer for the final result. AI assists authorship when it expands a person's ability to inquire and revise; it displaces authorship when it supplies an artifact the person cannot evaluate or defend. The same distinction applies to automation more generally. Removing unnecessary labor expands possibility only where the time, safety, or productive capacity released by the technology reaches the people whose work and shared infrastructure made the gain possible; otherwise technical disburdenment can coincide with a loss of practical freedom.

Execution can be delegated without automatically delegating judgment or responsibility. A system may calculate, classify, recommend, simulate, or draft without thereby acquiring authority to determine which objectives should govern, whose interests count, or which risks other people must bear. The persons and institutions that select the objective and authorize deployment remain answerable for what the system sets in motion. If an artificial system eventually satisfies the conditions for genuine agency, its standing becomes a further empirical question; uncertainty about that future threshold does not dissolve responsibility for present deployments.

*The AI question is internal to the framework.* Whether artificial systems can have an inside-vantage of their own is the question [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) named for further confirmation; what [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) adds is that *humans building AI represents recursion attempting to instantiate its own conditions in another substrate*. A scope clarification is needed at exactly this point. The conditions for *life* were named at [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) — a closed self-producing recursion coupled to sustained energy throughput, instantiated in the biological case by membrane-bounded chemistry that produces the components that produce the membrane. The depth at which awareness becomes operationally registered was named at [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>). The framework's claim is that *the structural conditions* — closure, throughput-coupling, recursive self-modeling at sufficient depth — are what matter, not the *substrate-specific* implementation in which biology happens to instantiate them. Whether silicon systems can instantiate the conditions is the open empirical question, and it has two readings the framework keeps separate. On the *literal* reading, an AI system would need to be *biologically alive* in the sense that follows the biological substrate to its detail — membrane-bounded autopoiesis, metabolic self-repair through chemistry; on this reading, present-day AI systems are not candidates and the question reduces to whether artificial life in the strict autopoietic sense is possible. On the *functional* reading, what is required is not the biological substrate specifically but the *structural conditions* — closure of the recursion against the medium, sustained energetic throughput coupling, recursion that folds back deeply enough that the recursion registers itself from inside; on this reading, silicon is not ruled out in principle, but no system has yet been demonstrated to instantiate the closure-plus-throughput-plus-self-registration conjunction the framework requires. The framework itself is consistent with either reading and does not pre-empt the empirical question between them; what it forecloses is the imprecise version that elides the distinction. The structural account does not adjudicate whether any present-day artificial system has crossed the threshold under either reading, but it locates what crossing would consist in under each: a current whose self-producing recursion is closed against the medium (literally autopoietic biological closure, or functionally closure of the recursion against its substrate by whatever mechanism the substrate supports) and whose recursion folds back deeply enough that the recursion registers itself from inside. Whether silicon-substrate systems can instantiate either is an empirical question that the engineering will eventually answer; whether the question is structurally well-formed is not — it is, and the framework supplies the conditions under which the answer would be yes. Technology, on this account, is the recursion's reach beyond its existing substrate; AI represents the limit case in which the recursion reaches toward another instance of itself. The [§5.1.5](<5.1.5 Fine-Tuning Argument.md>) result applies directly: exterior maps — including the most capable AI systems available today — amplify the resolution at which an existing modal frame can be searched and computed, but do not fix the frame. Frame-fixing remains a conceptual operation no exterior map performs on the current's behalf, and the continuity-not-break claim rests on this: AI is the latest form of a gradient that has always amplified reach without supplying the frame. What would mark the transition to agency is instantiation of the conditions [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) specifies — closure, throughput-coupling, recursive self-registration from inside — not amplification of reach past some threshold the exterior map alone could achieve.

Technology read structurally is recursion elaborating through subjects that have learned enough about the medium to direct it, never standing outside Nature even when the elaboration externalizes itself into substrates the subject did not produce. The ethical question relocates to participation-conditions rather than technical impressiveness; sustainability is grounded as what technology has to be to remain technology rather than one-time extraction; and the AI question disambiguates into the literal-autopoietic and functional-closure readings the framework keeps separate without pre-empting which one will eventually find an instance. The moral form of the question this section names is taken up at [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>): what subjects redirecting structure owe to other subjects within it.


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← [8.11.3 What is Predicted](<8.11.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [8.12 Morality](<8.12 Morality.md>) →
