When Design Remains Possible: Structural Admissibility under Irreversibility
欧阳佳惠1
作者信息
1. 西北师范大学
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Abstract
Across modern history, major technological transitions have repeatedly coincided with large-scale conflicts and systemic breakdowns. This temporal overlap is not accidental. Rather than viewing wars as exogenous political failures or technologies as neutral tools, we interpret both as manifestations of a deeper structural mismatch: moments when prevailing alignment baselines-used to evaluate value, responsibility, and control-remain fixed while the underlying techno-natural system has already crossed their domain of validity. This work is motivated by the hypothesis that avoiding future catastrophic re-alignment requires a methodological shift: from treating evaluation, control, and optimization as operations on flattened states, to treating them as operations on projected observations with explicit residuals, directional constraints, and non-equilibrium steady-state bands. Our goal is not to predict conflict, but to formalize a framework in which alignment baselines can migrate without requiring destructive system-wide resets. In earlier industrial eras, alignment baselines were anchored in territory, material production, and centralized control. As energy density, production scale, and coordination capacity expanded, these baselines temporarily succeeded in stabilizing growth. However, once technological capability exceeded the range where such baselines could faithfully represent system-wide consequences, stability was no longer maintained through gradual adjustment. Instead, high-dissipation events-wars, revolutions, and collapses-functioned as brutal mechanisms of re-alignment. From this perspective, technological breakthroughs do not directly cause conflict; they expose the insufficiency of inherited equivalence assumptions. Specifically, they reveal the cost of treating complex, irreversible processes as if they were reducible to instantaneous equivalences-as if transitions could be evaluated without thickness, delay, or residuals. When the implicit "thickness" of transformation is ignored, human agency, responsibility, and vulnerability are flattened into static comparisons that no longer correspond to physical or social reality.
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