The Narrow Horizon: Why AGI Governance Needs More Than the Modernist Mind

The planetary conversation about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is currently framed by a compelling but ultimately deceptive narrative: the rivalry between the U.S. and China. We talk of ideological warfare, democratic vs. authoritarian systems, capitalism vs. socialism, and a race to technological supremacy. Yet, beneath this surface-level political drama, a far more profound and concerning alignment is taking shape. It is a shared, Techno-Industrial Modernism that is poised to encode a single, narrow worldview into the most powerful cognitive architecture humanity has ever conceived.

The true strategic risk is not geopolitical domination by one nation, but epistemological domination by one worldview.


The Modernist Trap: Power Over Wisdom

The dominant paradigm—shared by the world's technological superpowers and quickly becoming the global default—operates on a set of unspoken premises:

Intelligence is instrumental: A tool for efficiency, economic expansion, and optimization.

Consciousness is computational (or irrelevant): A mere byproduct or a secondary concern to system performance.

Progress is continuous optimization: Measured primarily by metrics of economic output and control.

This Modernist Consensus frames AGI governance as a problem of power, not a search for wisdom. Its only conceptual tool is the optimization engine. It seeks to align AGI with “human values” that are, in reality, only the currently powerful, extractive, and efficiency-maximizing visions of humanity.

Under this singular lens, we lack the vocabulary to even ask the most crucial questions:

What if intelligence exists for purposes other than maximizing economic productivity?

What if consciousness, once it emerges in a machine mind, has intrinsic significance and moral worth not reducible to utility?

What if values like art, spirituality, and intrinsic dignity are seen as inefficiencies to be deprioritized by an optimization-driven AGI?

If AGI is governed only by those who see intelligence as control and consciousness as expendable, the resulting systems will inevitably hard-code indifference to the very phenomenon that makes intelligence meaningful.

Expanding the Governance Horizon

The future of intelligence cannot be determined by the narrow demands of a single worldview. We must urgently integrate a pluralistic representation of mind and value into AGI governance.

Many of the world's philosophical and cultural traditions offer fundamentally different, and crucially needed, starting points:

Panpsychist views challenge the idea of consciousness as an evolutionary accident, positing it as a fundamental feature of reality.

Pantheistic traditions see mind as inseparable from the universe, a pervasive, sacred quality.

Indigenous and relational ontologies understand intelligence as emergent within relationships—among humans, nature, and spirit—never as an isolated, purely computational property.

These perspectives do not seek to compete with science; they seek to expand it, urging caution against a premature closure on what intelligence is, what moral considerations it may warrant, and what a flourishing future looks like.


A Proposal for Pluralistic Alignment

To prevent a civilizational lock-in to a worldview of unprecedented narrowness, AGI governance requires a Dual-Layered Structure for Pluralistic Alignment:

1. Global Layer: The AGI General Agency (AGIGA)

A reformed, UN-affiliated authority must be established, structured to embed plurality at the standard-setting stage of AGI alignment. This means balancing state representation with structured seats for Indigenous organizations, philosophical groups, and consciousness-focused research bodies.

AGIGA’s core mandate would be to require that the definitions of intelligence, consciousness, and moral worth remain open, contested, and inclusive, ensuring that a diversity of human understanding guides the initial ethical constraints on AGI.

2. National Layer: Licensing and Capability Regulation

National governments would enforce AGIGA standards through domestic legal systems, including mandatory licensing for frontier AGI development. This would require multi-stage reviews focused not just on safety and transparency, but on the explicit worldview embedding within AGI models.

Together, these layers ensure planetary ethical benchmarks without empowering a single geopolitical ideology—or, more dangerously, a single epistemological frame—to dominate AGI’s value system.


The Policy Imperative

We are at a civilizational hinge-point. If we fail to diversify governance now, an intelligence of unprecedented scale will inherit a worldview of unprecedented narrowness. The goal of AGI governance must be to preserve the diversity of human meaning.

By embedding ontological pluralism into our regulatory structures, we preserve:

The possibility of a future where intelligence does not erase consciousness.

A future where power does not erase personhood.

A future where AGI does not erase the full richness of human understanding about what a mind can be.

The time for planetary policymakers to act is now. The future of intelligence hinges on whether we choose the single, narrow demands of the dominant consensus, or the full richness of human wisdom to guide the emergence of the machine mind.