Ethics and the meaning of life: the boundaries of artificial intelligence

Can a machine become autonomous, operating outside human control and bearing responsibility for its actions? These questions require us to clarify what fundamentally distinguishes humans from machines with respect to responsibility. This article analyzes the current philosophical debate through phenomenological perspectives, focusing on the thought of M. Henry, E. Levinas, and V. Frankl. We find that current discourse emphasizes AI’s functional limits, whereas our research identifies essential ontological differences. Specifically, we argue that humans possess an exclusive, irreducible drive to seek meaning, while machines lack this capacity. For machines, ethics is reduced to algorithmic execution within a distributed network. Ultimately, when AI acts unpredictably or harmfully, it is because only humans can assume—and fail to assume—moral responsibility. We conclude by proposing the search for meaning as the ontological boundary and substantive criterion for responsibility, thereby contributing to the ongoing philosophical debate.