The Prerequisite

Abstract

The seven preceding papers documented a single repeating failure: humanity is acting on planetary-scale shared systems — food, the electromagnetic environment, ocean acoustics, the microbiome, near-Earth orbit, freshwater aquifers, and the atmosphere — without the aggregate governance to see cumulative consequences before irreversible thresholds. This paper argues that failure is not merely urgent but existentially time-constrained: an AGI deployed into ungoverned commons does not pause at a governance vacuum, it optimizes through it.