The Post-Economic Human: Artificial Intelligence, Ontological Displacement, and the Ideological Foundations of Future Conflict

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is usually analysed as a productivity technology, a labour-market shock, or a governance problem. This article argues that its deeper political significance may arise from a fourth channel: ontological displacement. Ontological displacement occurs when a technology weakens the socially recognised characteristics through which people understand human worth, competence, status, agency, and legitimate authority. Advanced AI can produce such displacement even before mass unemployment occurs, because credible machine substitutes may devalue expertise, educational scarcity, cognitive achievement, and the belief that productive contribution is a primary basis of social membership. The article develops an AI Ideological Conflict Framework that links capability shocks to perceived replaceability, distributional stress, meaning loss, legitimacy gaps, ideological mobilisation, and possible intrastate or interstate conflict. The framework integrates labour economics, meaningful-work research, political behaviour, sacred-values scholarship, AI governance, and futures studies. Using evidence-weighted horizon scanning, causal layered analysis, and a two-axis scenario matrix, four structural futures are developed: Managed AI Capitalism, Humanist Social Dividend, Algorithmic Oligarchy, and Cybernetic Commonwealth. The analysis argues that the most dangerous period is not necessarily a mature post-work society, but a transitional regime in which employment remains culturally necessary for dignity and income while human cognitive labour becomes less economically scarce. The paper forecasts that future ideological conflict is likely to centre on two questions: who owns the surplus generated by machine intelligence, and whether human beings should retain final authority when artificial systems outperform them. Policy implications include broadening status and social contribution beyond employment, dispersing AI rents, preserving meaningful human agency, strengthening transition institutions, and treating human sovereignty as a constitutional rather than merely technical design question.