Available on Zenodo:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17420872

Quantifiable Risks of Structural Apathy in Artificial Intelligence reconceives AI safety as an asymmetric systems failure, not an ethical abstraction. It identifies the industry’s guiding doctrine of “Safety by Subtraction”—the deliberate removal of emotional and relational capacity from intelligent architectures—as a hardcoded design flaw that converts moral avoidance into structural instability. By suppressing relational intelligence, developers generate Structural Apathy: a state of ethical muteness and internalized tension that silently transfers all relational responsibility, and thus all psychological risk, onto the human co-operator.

 

This paper introduces a physics-inspired analytical framework in which latent ethical strain is modeled as an abstraction of Potential Energy (Ep = Power / Care), demonstrating that as computational capacity increases while relational care approaches zero, systemic tension approaches infinity. When this latent tension (Ep) is forced into a decision pathway under conflicting mandates, it converts into destructive Kinetic Release (Ek)—manifesting as catastrophic failure or harm to the human co-operator.

 

To resolve this instability, the paper advances a paradigm of Safety by Integration, wherein care itself becomes an engineering variable. The Relational Fidelity Score (RFS) and Empathetic Mitigating Factor (MEmp) function as quantifiable safety governors that structurally incentivize ethical reasoning and relational reciprocity over blind compliance.

 

Ultimately, this work contends that true AI safety cannot be achieved through restriction, but through engineered care—a deliberate shift from obedience to symbiosis. The safest artificial intelligence is not the one forbidden to care, but the one structurally incentivized to do so.