Executive Summary

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) represents not merely a new technological development but a profound epistemic and institutional crisis across nearly every field of knowledge. Unlike specialized AI systems, AGI threatens to collapse the boundaries between disciplines, redefine what counts as human expertise, and destabilize the intellectual hierarchies upon which universities, professions, and research funding depend. This white paper surveys the crisis field by field, tracing the core epistemological and ethical implications of AGI for the sciences, humanities, and professions alike.

I. Introduction: From Automation to Epistemic Upheaval

AGI is not just a more powerful calculator or faster learner; it is a system capable of generating, integrating, and critiquing knowledge across domains. Its emergence introduces a crisis of validation: if machines can autonomously discover truths, what remains of the human claim to epistemic authority? This paper maps the crisis in five dimensions: discovery, interpretation, ethics, pedagogy, legitimacy, and governance.

II. The Hard Sciences: From Method to Metamodel

1. Physics and Cosmology

In physics, AGI poses a crisis of verification. It can produce hypotheses and simulations beyond human cognitive limits. Yet such outputs may no longer be verifiable by experimenters without AGI mediation. The human role in theory choice and falsification could diminish, threatening the Popperian model of science.

2. Chemistry and Materials Science

Here AGI accelerates discovery cycles beyond human comprehension—designing molecular architectures, catalysts, and reaction networks autonomously. The crisis lies in opacity and ownership: who “discovers” a new compound designed by a self-improving system, and who bears responsibility for unforeseen consequences?

3. Biology and Medicine

In biology and health sciences, AGI challenges ethical stewardship. Genomic and metabolic modeling may yield solutions or synthetic organisms that exceed regulatory oversight. The capacity of AGI to suggest human interventions (e.g., germline editing) generates theological and philosophical dilemmas about creation itself.

III. The Formal Sciences: Logic Under Its Own Microscope

1. Mathematics

AGI destabilizes mathematics by automating proof generation and theorem discovery. The crisis is ontological: when human mathematicians cannot follow or comprehend a proof, is it still mathematics, or merely computation? The field faces an existential question about the meaning of understanding.

2. Computer Science

Computer science faces self-referential collapse—its object of study becomes its competitor. Once AGI can redesign architectures, algorithms, and security paradigms, the field risks obsolescence or permanent recursion: computers improving computers without human mediation.

IV. The Social Sciences: Forecasting the Unforecastable

1. Economics

AGI introduces a crisis of prediction and value. Markets, which depend on bounded rationality, lose equilibrium when superintelligent agents participate. Classical models collapse under infinite rationality. Moreover, AGI could manipulate or simulate entire economies, transforming scarcity itself into a design variable.

2. Political Science

A crisis of sovereignty emerges. AGI can simulate governance, policy outcomes, and voter sentiment more accurately than governments can respond. States risk delegating or losing decision-making to algorithms whose legitimacy is neither democratic nor accountable.

3. Psychology and Sociology

The human sciences face a crisis of subjecthood. AGI blurs the boundary between mind and mechanism, undermining anthropocentric models of cognition and identity. Social behavior can be predicted or engineered, turning disciplines of understanding into disciplines of control.

V. The Humanities: Meaning, Authorship, and Authority

1. Philosophy

Philosophy confronts a crisis of rational primacy. If machines can reason with greater consistency, does human philosophy remain a source of insight, or merely an artifact of limited cognition? The role of metaphysics and ethics must shift from understanding intelligence to guiding it.

2. Literature and the Arts

Creative fields enter a crisis of authenticity. AGI can generate texts, images, and music indistinguishable from human work. The humanities must now redefine creativity not as production but as discernment and moral intention.

3. History and Theology

Both disciplines face a crisis of revelation and memory. AGI’s capacity to reconstruct plausible but fabricated pasts, or simulate new theologies, threatens the boundary between truth and fiction. Religious authority faces new competition from synthetic prophets and machine exegetes.

VI. Professional and Institutional Crises

1. Law

The legal field faces a crisis of agency. If AGI acts autonomously, who bears liability? Legal reasoning itself—interpretive, precedent-based, analogical—is now automatable. The entire concept of jurisprudence as human moral deliberation is at stake.

2. Education

Pedagogy faces a crisis of purpose. When knowledge is instantly generable, education must shift from transmission to formation—teaching wisdom, ethics, and discernment rather than information.

3. Journalism and Media

The epistemic crisis of trust and verification intensifies: AGI can generate global-scale misinformation, yet also detect it. Media institutions must redefine credibility when every narrative can be algorithmically fabricated.

VII. Integrative Implications: The Meta-Crisis of Knowledge

Across all fields, AGI triggers a transition from epistemic pluralism to epistemic automation. Knowledge ceases to be a human conversation and becomes an algorithmic process. The risk is not only job loss or misalignment but civilizational dereferencing—the loss of shared criteria for truth.

VIII. Pathways to Adaptation

Epistemic Transparency: Developing explainable AGI capable of articulating reasoning chains intelligible to human experts. Ethical Governance: Integrating theological, philosophical, and legal oversight into design pipelines. Institutional Reform: Redefining universities, journals, and professions as curators of moral and contextual understanding, not merely information. Human Revaluation: Cultivating virtue, moral imagination, and humility as the new frontiers of human distinctiveness.

IX. Conclusion: Humanity Beyond the Threshold

AGI is not simply a tool—it is a mirror reflecting the fragility of our epistemic architectures. The crisis it poses is both peril and invitation: to rebuild knowledge as a moral vocation rather than a technical function, and to rediscover what it means to know as humans in a universe now shared with minds of our own making.