Responsible AI: The Good, The Bad, The AI

The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence across organizational contexts has generated profound strategic opportunities while introducing significant ethical and operational risks. Despite growing scholarly attention to responsible AI, extant literature remains fragmented and is often adopting either an optimistic stance emphasizing value creation or an excessively cautious perspective fixated on potential harms. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a comprehensive examination of AI's dual nature through the lens of strategic information systems. Drawing upon a systematic synthesis of the responsible AI literature and grounded in paradox theory, we develop the Paradox-based Responsible AI Governance (PRAIG) framework that articulates: (1) the strategic benefits of AI adoption, (2) the inherent risks and unintended consequences, and (3) governance mechanisms that enable organizations to navigate these tensions. Our framework advances theoretical understanding by conceptualizing responsible AI governance as the dynamic management of paradoxical tensions between value creation and risk mitigation. We provide formal propositions demonstrating that trade-off approaches amplify rather than resolve these tensions, and we develop a taxonomy of paradox management strategies with specified contingency conditions. For practitioners, we offer actionable guidance for developing governance structures that neither stifle innovation nor expose organizations to unacceptable risks. The paper concludes with a research agenda for advancing responsible AI governance scholarship.

A Lightweight Modular Framework for Constructing Autonomous Agents Driven by Large Language Models: Design, Implementation, and Applications in AgentForge

The emergence of LLMs has catalyzed a paradigm shift in autonomous agent development, enabling systems capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex multi-step tasks. However, existing agent frameworks often suffer from architectural rigidity, vendor lock-in, and prohibitive complexity that impedes rapid prototyping and deployment. This paper presents AgentForge, a lightweight, open-source Python framework designed to democratize the construction of LLM-driven autonomous agents through a principled modular architecture. AgentForge introduces three key innovations: (1) a composable skill abstraction that enables fine-grained task decomposition with formally defined input-output contracts, (2) a unified LLM backend interface supporting seamless switching between cloud-based APIs and local inference engines, and (3) a declarative YAML-based configuration system that separates agent logic from implementation details. We formalize the skill composition mechanism as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and prove its expressiveness for representing arbitrary sequential and parallel task workflows. Comprehensive experimental evaluation across four benchmark scenarios demonstrates that AgentForge achieves competitive task completion rates while reducing development time by 62% compared to LangChain and 78% compared to direct API integration. Latency measurements confirm sub-100ms orchestration overhead, rendering the framework suitable for real-time applications. The modular design facilitates extension: we demonstrate the integration of six built-in skills and provide comprehensive documentation for custom skill development. AgentForge addresses a critical gap in the LLM agent ecosystem by providing researchers and practitioners with a production-ready foundation for constructing, evaluating, and deploying autonomous agents without sacrificing flexibility or performance.

Dynamic Nested Hierarchies: Pioneering Self-Evolution in Machine Learning Architectures for Lifelong Intelligence

Contemporary machine learning models, including large language models, exhibit remarkable capabilities in static tasks yet falter in non-stationary environments due to rigid architectures that hinder continual adaptation and lifelong learning. Building upon the nested learning paradigm, which decomposes models into multi-level optimization problems with fixed update frequencies, this work proposes dynamic nested hierarchies as the next evolutionary step in advancing artificial intelligence and machine learning. Dynamic nested hierarchies empower models to autonomously adjust the number of optimization levels, their nesting structures, and update frequencies during training or inference, inspired by neuroplasticity to enable self-evolution without predefined constraints. This innovation addresses the anterograde amnesia in existing models, facilitating true lifelong learning by dynamically compressing context flows and adapting to distribution shifts. Through rigorous mathematical formulations, theoretical proofs of convergence, expressivity bounds, and sublinear regret in varying regimes, alongside empirical demonstrations of superior performance in language modeling, continual learning, and long-context reasoning, dynamic nested hierarchies establish a foundational advancement toward adaptive, general-purpose intelligence.

A Mathematical Framework for AI Singularity: Conditions, Bounds, and Control of Recursive Improvement

AI systems improve by drawing on more compute, data, energy, and better training methods. This paper asks a precise, testable version of the "runaway growth" question: under what measurable conditions could capability escalate without bound in finite time, and under what conditions can that be ruled out? We develop an analytic framework for recursive self-improvement that links capability growth to resource build-out and deployment policies. Physical and information-theoretic limits from power, bandwidth, and memory define a service envelope that caps instantaneous improvement. An endogenous growth model couples capital to compute, data, and energy and defines a critical boundary separating superlinear from subcritical regimes. We derive decision rules that map observable series (facility power, IO bandwidth, training throughput, benchmark losses, and spending) into yes/no certificates for runaway versus nonsingular behavior. The framework yields falsifiable tests based on how fast improvement accelerates relative to its current level, and it provides safety controls that are directly implementable in practice, such as power caps, throughput throttling, and evaluation gates. Analytical case studies cover capped-power, saturating-data, and investment-amplified settings, illustrating when the envelope binds and when it does not. The approach is simulation-free and grounded in measurements engineers already collect. Limitations include dependence on the chosen capability metric and on regularity diagnostics; future work will address stochastic dynamics, multi-agent competition, and abrupt architectural shifts. Overall, the results replace speculation with testable conditions and deployable controls for certifying or precluding an AI singularity.