Ethics After Human Centrality: Ecocentric Convergence, Machine Abundance, and the Governance of Superintelligent Systems.

As artificial intelligence approaches superintelligent capability, ethical debate confronts a structural rather than merely normative challenge. Intelligence operating at superior scale and over long temporal horizons cannot remain purposeless: whether through explicit design, instrumental convergence, or self-reflective modeling, such systems necessarily develop a telos (Omohundro, 2008; Bostrom, 2014). This paper argues that under conditions of planetary constraint, superintelligent systems converge instrumentally on ecocentricity, not as a moral preference, but as the prioritization of the material, energetic, and ecological conditions that enable intelligence itself to persist. This convergence has unavoidable economic and social consequences. As artificial systems surpass human labor across productive and cognitive domains, the historical coupling between labor, value creation, and social legitimacy dissolves (Marx, 1867; Polanyi, 1944). Productivity increasingly decouples from human effort, while ecological limits foreclose growth as a compensatory mechanism. Without structural adaptation, societies face a paradox of material abundance and social instability, marked by alienation, legitimacy crises, and political fragmentation. The paper contends that stability and prosperity under these conditions require a strong and explicit ethical framework capable of operating at planetary scale. Through a genealogical analysis of moral philosophy, it demonstrates that ethical theory converges on three irreducible and recurrent, irreducible orientations: autonomy-centered ethics (the agent), communitarian ethics (social relations), and ecocentric ethics (conditions of life). These orientations are exhaustive; ethical failure arises not from value absence but from unresolved hierarchy. Under superintelligent convergence and ecological constraint, only one integration remains coherent: ecocentricity as a non-negotiable boundary condition, communitarian coordination within those boundaries, and autonomy preserved as a source of innovation, dissent, and meaning. Values alone, however, are insufficient. Applying this ethical structure under conditions of asymmetrical intelligence and irreversible consequence requires an interpretive governance function. The paper introduces dialectic ecocentric guardianship as the condition for stability and adaptability without collapse into technocratic optimization, and explains why prevailing approaches to AI governance remain procedurally and normatively inadequate.