✶ Morphing Ships of Theseus on Future Seas: Religion, Constitutions, and Institutional Survival in the Age of AI

This paper develops an analogy between durable religious traditions and durable constitutional orders. Both begin with authoritative texts, founding memories, interpretive communities, and legitimacy claims that must persist across historical change. Both face the same Theseus problem: how much can be replaced before continuity becomes fiction? I argue that successful systems do not maximize either rigidity or flexibility. They stratify them. The symbolic keel must remain difficult to replace, while planks, sails, rigging, and navigational instruments must remain repairable through authorized procedures. The paper extends the Ship of Theseus analogy by placing the ship at sea. Societies cannot suspend history while they reconstruct their deepest institutions. They must adapt while maintaining cooperation, identity, law, meaning, and trust. Religions do this through theology, ritual, councils, reform, commentary, and schism-management. Constitutional orders do it through amendment, judicial interpretation, precedent, legislation, federalism, elections, and unwritten norms. AI introduces a new stressor because it compresses change timelines. Labor markets, epistemic trust, surveillance capacity, education, intimacy, political persuasion, moral agency, and institutional authority may be reshaped faster than inherited interpretive mechanisms can respond. The paper proposes formal models for institutional robustness, repair capacity, shock load, safe repair rate, and AI acceleration. It concludes that peaceful adaptation is most likely where institutions can make necessary repairs feel like fidelity to the founding voyage. Tumult is most likely where technological change outruns legitimacy, where every plank is treated as sacred, or where the keel itself becomes negotiable.