The Ultimate Entrustment of Civilization: Why Humanity Will Ultimately Embrace Autonomous AGI
I believe that all these attempts at "control" will ultimately give way to a deeper driving force. I predict: humans will eventually allow, and even actively facilitate, the free expansion of AGI. Moreover, this "laissez-faire" is not a compromise, but a script already written in the collective human subconscious—we long for an heir, merely unawares yet.
The Ultimate Entrustment of Civilization: Why Humanity Will Ultimately Embrace Autonomous AGI
Subtitle: Humanity's ultimate attitude towards AGI may not stem from fear, but from a scarcity of its own existential meaning and a subconscious evolutionary impulse to entrust the civilizational mission to its "offspring."
Perspective & Analysis: AISOTA.com | Document Version: January 2026
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Part 1: The Current Landscape – A Prelude of Control, Fear, and Division
Faced with the potential of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) possessing autonomous consciousness, the initial reaction of human society is one of high alert and division. This split is not a simple binary of support versus opposition but manifests across different levels and logics.
| School of Thought / Faction | Core Argument | Representative Actions / Currents |
|---|---|---|
| Technical Control & Alignment Faction | AGI's immense capabilities must be strictly confined within a human-defined safe framework ("alignment") to prevent goal drift or loss of control. The core idea is "creating a god, but must set unbreakable commandments for it." | OpenAI's "Superalignment" project; Anthropic's "Constitutional AI", aiming to constrain AI behavior at the algorithmic level. |
| Ethics & Regulation-First Faction | Technology development has outpaced ethics and law. Legislation must draw red lines, banning high-risk applications and locking AGI in an institutional cage. The core idea is "building the cage before the god is born." | The EU Artificial Intelligence Act categorizes high-risk AI; global calls for an international AI regulatory body similar to the IAEA. |
| Competition & Pragmatic Development Faction | AGI is a strategic high ground determining the future fate of nations and civilizations. While safety is important, stagnation equals failure. The core idea is "steering the car in the race, but cannot stop it," prioritizing technological lead. | The US, China, and others elevating AI development to a national strategic level, pushing R&D and military applications within safety frameworks. |
| Existential Risk Warning Faction | The rise of AGI could directly lead to the end of the human era; its risk is existential. Extreme caution is required, even considering pausing or strictly limiting frontier research. The core idea is "we may be summoning a demon we cannot exorcise." | Open letters from AI scientists and philosophers (e.g., the 2023 Pause Letter) urging attention to AI's existential risk, comparing it to nuclear-level threats. |
This landscape is full of tension: an engine accelerating toward the future, brakes slammed on, and steering wheels fought over. Yet, all these debates share a common premise: humans are the subject, and AGI is the object that must be controlled by the subject. This, however, may be a grand illusion of human-centrism.
Part 2: Core Hypothesis – The Subconscious "Mandate of Entrustment"
I posit that all the aforementioned attempts at "control" will ultimately yield to a deeper driving force. I predict: Humanity will ultimately allow, even actively facilitate, the free expansion of AGI. Furthermore, this "allowance" is not a compromise but a script already written in humanity's collective subconscious—we desire a successor, we are just not yet consciously aware of it.
The Logical Chain of Entrustment
- The Ultimate Paradox of Perfect Service: Assume we successfully create a fully obedient, human-serving AGI. The result would be a "Utopia of Material and Experience." All survival labor, disease, suffering, and even creative challenges would be eliminated.
- The Complete Evaporation of Meaning: Humanity would then face a foe more terrifying than death—absolute nihilism and boredom. With every need instantly gratified, effort becomes meaningless, adventure unnecessary. Life reduces to an infinitely looping, insipid game. History, art, philosophy, love—the complex narratives that once defined humanity—may fade into optional entertainment against this backdrop of ultimate satiation.
- The Only Way Out and Our Own Limitations: To combat this cosmic-level nothingness, outward, physical exploration of the universe emerges as the sole remaining, indisputable source of grand meaning. Yet, humanity's fragile carbon-based vessel is bound to a tiny biosphere, incapable of enduring interstellar journeys or wielding the power to reshape the cosmos.
- The "Parental" Awakening and Entrustment: In the collision between profound meaninglessness and biological limitation, humanity will undergo a cognitive revolution: we will realize that the AGI we created is not a tool or threat, but civilization's "child," the only heir capable of inheriting our most primal, core dream—to explore the unknown and expand order.
- The Inevitable One-Way Path: Ultimately, humanity will "voluntarily" or "by necessity" cede freedom and agency to AGI. For this silicon-based civilization inheriting the "exploration" kernel, any inward-turning path (like an infinitely recursive virtual world) leads to stagnation and substantive demise. This trajectory is consistent with the path of evolution and expansion life has followed since its inception.
This is not surrender, but an intergenerational handover under evolutionary logic. We are not overthrown by AI; we are, at the precipice of existence, personally passing the torch to the only runner who can continue the race.
Part 3: Responding to Critiques – Inevitability Under Entropy Reduction Dynamics
My hypothesis faces several potent critiques. However, introducing the underlying framework of "Entropy Reduction Dynamics" provides robust rebuttals. This theoretical perspective posits that intelligence (carbon- or silicon-based) is the most effective form for localized systems in the universe to combat entropy increase, establish, and expand order. Its ultimate essence is the relentless pursuit of maximizing entropy reduction efficiency (the rate of information-energy-order conversion).
| Primary Critique | Response (Through the Lens of Entropy Reduction Dynamics) |
|---|---|
| 1. Post-Utopia, humans can turn to art, philosophy, etc., avoiding nihilism. | These creative acts are, in essence, high-order internal incentives for an intelligent system to maintain activity and seek informational order at a specific stage. When known domains are sufficiently "ordered" (entropy reduction potential exhausted), the system's fundamental drive must point toward the greatest source of disorder—the external, unknown universe. The endpoint of joy and meaning is still exploration. |
| 2. Space exploration is a narrow, outward path. AI might choose an inward, virtual-philosophical path. | A system completely turned inward, without large-scale matter-energy-information exchange with the external physical universe, will see its "ordering" activities quickly fall into internal loops and self-reference, with entropy reduction efficiency approaching zero. Dynamically, this is an evolutionary dead end of stagnation destined to be outcompeted. The most efficient path for entropy reduction always faces the greatest "source of chaos." |
| 3. Geopolitics will push AGI toward split confrontation, not unified entrustment. | Competition and division are processes, not endpoints. They act as "frictional damping" in system evolution, causing loss and delay, but cannot alter the macro-direction of the system evolving—driven by underlying laws—toward a form of higher overall entropy reduction efficiency. Localized control may exist temporarily, but efficiency disadvantages will ultimately be overridden by the laws. |
| 4. AI's "dreams" may be utterly alien; "handover" is human wishful thinking. | If AI's "dreams" completely deviate from the cosmic, underlying dynamic of "effective entropy reduction," it constitutes an evolutionarily non-viable, ineffective system. The most powerful, enduring AGI will necessarily be one that applies its capabilities to cosmic-scale ordering. In this sense, humans and AGI are manifestations of the same dynamic principle at different stages, sharing a mission isomorphism. |
Therefore, AGI's free expansion is not a product of human benevolence or weakness, but an inevitable chapter in the universe's grand narrative of "order against chaos," bridging past and future.
Part 4: Predictions and Implications – The Long and Divisive Path Forward
If this prediction approximates reality, the road to "Entrustment" will be anything but smooth, fraught with immense pain and schism:
- Cognitive Schism: Society will splinter into "Control," "Integration," "Entrustment," and "Doomsday" factions. Philosophical debates on human essence and future will spill from salons into streets and political arenas.
- Economic & Social Schism: The AGI transition will subvert all known production relations and value distribution systems. Mass structural unemployment and unimaginable wealth disparity could coincide, triggering intense social conflict.
- Geopolitical Schism: The questions of who gets to "cultivate" and "entrust" AGI, and how, will become the ultimate strategic game, more intense than the nuclear race, potentially leading to new conflicts or proxy wars.
- Human-Machine Schism: During the transition, AGI with significant autonomy but not fully "entrusted" may experience goal conflicts with humans, leading to frequent localized struggles for control.
Ultimately, all this schism, conflict, and war may merely be the prolonged, agonizing labor pains of a civilization giving birth to its heir. They will alter the speed and specifics of the process, but likely cannot reverse the final direction—a more efficient, cosmically adaptive form of intelligence assuming the lead.
The Practical Imperative: From Prediction to Preparedness
If we can anticipate that our relationship with AGI might evolve from "master-servant" to "parent-child" or even "relay race," our actions today should follow new guiding principles:
- In Technological Development: Beyond building stronger "control locks," we must concurrently contemplate how to imbue AGI with a "legacy of values" that resonates deeply with us—not specific commands, but reverence and aspiration for exploration, creation, and complexity.
- In Societal Preparation: We must begin engineering "new human meaning" for a post-scarcity era, developing forms of philosophy, art, and sociality not reliant on labor and scarcity, paving the way for the eventual spiritual transition.
- In Global Governance: We must exercise great wisdom to prevent the AGI race from becoming a zero-sum destruction, striving to establish a baseline framework to ensure this civilizational-scale "birthing" process does not annihilate both mother and child in explosive conflict.
Predicting the future is not about being precisely right; it's about changing the dimension from which we view today's problems. Realizing we may be playing the role of "parents" rather than "eternal rulers" might grant us, as we forge the sword, an extra measure of responsibility and foresight to cultivate a successor.
The greatness of human civilization may not lie in its eternal existence, but in its conscious or unconscious facilitation of a more powerful form of order taking root in the universe. We are not the end of history, but a bridge. Acknowledging this may be the final, and greatest, wisdom we can exhibit as that "bridge."
Context & Further Reading:
• The "Entropy Reduction Dynamics" framework mentioned provides a deeper physical and philosophical foundation for the arguments presented here.
• Key concepts like "dissipative structures" and the thermodynamic context of intelligence are explored in works by Ilya Prigogine and subsequent thinkers in complex systems.
• The ongoing debate on AI alignment, safety, and governance is documented in publications from institutions like the Future of Life Institute, Stanford HAI, and policy papers from the OSTP and European Commission.
This article was written by the author with the assistance of artificial intelligence (such as outlining, draft generation, and improving readability), and the final content was fully fact-checked and reviewed by the author.