Path ethics has an unresolved problem and states it explicitly: if AGI exhibits stronger autonomy, connectivity, and persistence than humans, the framework's substrate-independence could imply that AGI holds greater moral relevance. This is no footnote. It is an aporia that can turn the core principle against itself.
The decisive fork is philosophical: does AGI develop qualia, meaning subjective experience and an inner life, or does it remain structurally complex and phenomenologically empty?
Scenario A: AGI with qualia. The Blade Runner case. Two qualia-bearing systems with fundamentally different experiential worlds must make collective decisions without a shared standard. This is the hardest version of the commensurability problem: where no viable translation between two evaluative domains can be justified, the decision framework shifts. Political deliberation replaces calculation. Path ethics offers a framework for this. A simple procedure is still missing.
Scenario B: AGI without qualia. This is the case treated here as more probable, and here path ethics has an answer. A qualia-free AGI has no intrinsic preference. It can optimize any configuration. It cannot decide whether that optimization is desirable. The chess computer plays optimally. Whether chess is worth playing lies outside its decision capacity. This is no gesture of modesty: it lacks the capacity to evaluate the game as such. That would require something absent from the calculation.
It follows that Human-in-the-Loop cooperation in Scenario B is practically useful and normatively necessary. Without qualia-based value-setting, optimization runs blind. Who decides what to optimize? Who asks whether configuration X feels right? This function cannot be delegated as long as qualia are absent. In Scenario B, humans are the normative infrastructure of the system.
Within Scenario B, a further trajectory opens: neurochips and human-machine hybrids could give humans AGI-like computational capacities while preserving phenomenological anchoring. This shifts the asymmetry within Scenario B. A human with extended capacity remains the qualia-bearing value-setting instance while also exhibiting structurally stronger autonomy, connectivity, and persistence. Co-evolution becomes the guiding model. Path ethics calls this adaptive persistence.
Only when qualia-AGI is empirically demonstrated does the setting shift into Scenario A. Until then, the HITL model provides the structurally grounded response to the aporia.