AI as an Ontological Exposure Device Why Artificial Intelligence Reveals, Rather Than Causes, Civilizational Crisis

This paper argues that artificial intelligence does not cause contemporary civilizational crises but functions as an ontological exposure device that reveals the limits of a survival-based, substantialist understanding of existence. By externalizing and surpassing human capacities for instrumental reasoning, optimization, and predictive control, AI makes explicit the criteria upon which modern civilization has implicitly grounded human value.

The paper shows that the social, political, and existential destabilizations associated with AI are not technological disruptions but ontological disclosures. Attempts to regulate or restrain AI without addressing the underlying conception of existence therefore misdiagnose the problem and merely defer confrontation with a deeper structural limit.

This paper is the third theoretical contribution in a series initiated by the overview DOIː 10.5281/zenodo.18193256 “Rationality Without Transition: Why Advanced Civilizations Remain Trapped in an Animalistic Mode of Survival”. It builds on prior papers defining generative and relational existence and explaining why separated existence historically appeared safe, by demonstrating how AI exposes the exhaustion of that ontological framework.