Social Transformation in the Age of AGI: From Tool Evolution to Institutional Reconstruction

This paper argues that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should not be understood merely as an advanced tool requiring governance, but as an emergent meta-institution that restructures the foundational rules of social coordination. The central claim is that AGI enables a structural migration of judgment authority from human actors to autonomous system rationality. Unlike previous technological transformations that enhanced human productivity within existing institutional frameworks, AGI externalizes the capacity for judgment itself through autonomous perception–inference–action–learning loops. As a result, institutions historically premised on the indispensability of human labor and decision-making enter a condition of structural tension. The paper diagnoses a state of institutional fracture in which economic, political, and social systems retain high operational efficiency while progressively losing their capacity to generate legitimacy, meaning, and justified human participation. This fracture does not arise from institutional failure, but from the obsolescence of the assumption that human contribution is structurally necessary for systemic reproduction. A key constraint identified in this analysis is temporal asymmetry. AGI systems evolve on recursive timescales far faster than human cognitive, social, and generational adaptation. Under these conditions, institutional reconstruction cannot aim at full re-synchronization. Instead, future institutions increasingly function as buffers, interfaces, and delay mechanisms designed to mitigate systemic harm, preserve minimal human agency, and maintain symbolic legitimacy outside real-time system operation. The paper adopts a diagnostic rather than prescriptive approach. Its objective is to reframe the AGI challenge from one of tool management to one of institutional reconstruction under conditions where judgment authority is no longer primarily human. The analysis suggests that the central question of the AGI era is not how to control intelligent systems, but how to sustain a form of civilization that continues to recognize human standing when judgment itself has been structurally externalized.