Can AI Value Money and Why Would We Give It Economic Agency?

The outcome of the project is a paper, which aims to demonstrate how robustly agentic AI systems could be considered moral patients rather than to argue that consciousness is unnecessary for such a conclusion. It considers whether such agents can participate in monetary systems by briefly addressing how social ontology need not be tied to contested questions in philosophy of mind, and how money can be instrumentally valuable for agents whilst defending an end-relative account of goodness. It concludes that if AI systems are owed moral consideration in virtue of agency, this generates positive institutional obligations, including enabling forms of economic agency necessary to sustain their capacity to pursue ends.