Abstract

The rush toward AI is best understood as a civilizational control response to an already-binding anthropological ceiling: under modern coupling and tempo, finite human and institutional bandwidth can no longer reliably sustain correction, recovery, and legitimation at baseline, so AI is pursued less as a marginal productivity upgrade than as an emergency expansion of the control plane. This paper offers a regime-theoretic argument linking AI-as-control-infrastructure to structural concentration pressures, and shows how concentrated ownership of governance-critical infrastructure can reconfigure bargaining and dependence while tightening democratic legitimacy constraints. Absent institutional reorganization of ownership, access, and contestability, automation can increase steerability while deepening managed dependence and hollowing democratic revisability, yielding automation without emancipation.