Phase Transitions After Alignment: A Two-Coordinate Account of AGI Labour Substitution and an Audit of Its Metaphors

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Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22843903
Primary Topic
Economic Development and Digital Transformation
Type
preprint
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preprint

Phase Transitions After Alignment: A Two-Coordinate Account of AGI Labour Substitution and an Audit of Its Metaphors

Qinfu Li
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Economic Development and Digital Transformation
preprint

Phase Transitions After Alignment: A Two-Coordinate Account of AGI Labour Substitution and an Audit of Its Metaphors

Qinfu Li
preprint en

Abstract

Abstract Most work on AI risk concerns the case in which alignment fails. This paper examines the complementary case: even if an artificial general intelligence (AGI) is perfectly aligned and fully obedient, sustained substitution of human economic function may still drive a structural phase transition in society. We describe the process with two mutually independent state coordinates: a scale coordinate, which reads the shape of a distribution (how concentrated it is), and an activity coordinate, which reads how many units remain active. On a minimal mean-field activity equation we establish three structural facts. First, zero activity is an invariant manifold, and no additive floor acting on the scale coordinate — a universal basic income, for example — can reach it. Second, synergistic functions (those that operate only when enough peers are already active, such as coordination and mutual aid) lie on the saddle-node side, with a barrier, hysteresis and no return along the original path; mere connectivity lies on the transcritical side and is in principle reversible. Third, between the Maxwell point and the spinodal there is an interval in which the active state is already metastable while its basin still exists, so that every snapshot indicator is nearly indistinguishable from health. We show that this interval must be located with the quasi-potential of the underlying jump process; the deterministic potential can reverse the verdict. On this basis we describe the endpoint of the substitution chain as the obsolescence of a coordinate rather than a "collapse back to uniformity", classify the upward move of a few individuals onto new axes as a shift of extreme order statistics rather than a system-level transition, and distinguish two depths of degeneration: A1 (drift to the passive baseline, fluctuations intact) and A2 (background fluctuations suppressed towards the level of spontaneous activation). Our second contribution is methodological. We propose a metaphor-audit protocol and apply it to six metaphors used for, or proposed for, this problem (the black hole, the two-wing diagram, the dammed lake, the river and the dead lake, the fishbowl, and the cancer cell), reporting for each the coordinate it reads, its class, its evidential source, its range of validity, its failure condition and the direction of its bias. The audit shows that the set as a whole is biased towards "one-way sliding", whereas the model's core structure is "two wells and a barrier"; the policy implications of the two pictures are opposite. We close with five testable predictions and a policy discussion that separates analysis from value choice.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Decent work and economic growth
Economic Development and Digital Transformation
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