The Political Economy of AGI Transition: Labor Displacement, Capital Concentration, and Gray-Zone Mediation

This study defines the social crisis of the AGI transition not as a single event but as the superposition of four analytically distinguishable moments: labor displacement and capital concentration (causal channels ① and ②, on one plane), cognitive limitation (③, an epistemic condition that runs through all three channels), and institutional lag (④, the normative environmental condition within which the channels operate). These four are not four terms of equal standing, and this asymmetry is made explicit in the body. The adversary is not AGI itself but an unmediated AGI transition. The study methodologically separates the decomposition of causes from the branching of outcomes; the latter is described conditionally by converging the behavioral combinations of three actors — capital, intelligentsia, and the state — onto four attractors of the dialectical quartet Thesis·Mediation·Antithesis·Synthesis (正·中·反· 合). Three claims are advanced. First, a passive cash-transfer Universal Basic Income addresses income loss but not ownership concentration or access inequality, and is therefore insufficient as a transition mechanism on its own. Second, even when both the distributive and asset layers are mediated, three irreducible crises remain — legitimacy, truth, and subjecthood — and the Gray Zone is not a device that “solves” these three but a diagnosis that reveals them as objects of mediation. Third, at the distributive layer the Gray Zone offers one of the most coherent — though not the only — institutional candidates for an integrative transition, by way of equity-linked predistribution. The objective is not to abolish market capitalism but to stabilize, in advance, the social foundation on which market capitalism itself depends so that the AGI productivity shock does not destroy it. The prescription of this study is Keynesian transition stabilization, not a neo-Marxian theory of collapse.