TOWARDS AUTONOMOUS DIGITAL CIVILIZATION

Abstract

The emergence of autonomous digital civilisation — a sociotechnical configuration in which artificial intelligence systems assume increasing agency over the foundational infrastructures, governance mechanisms, economic processes, and knowledge production systems upon which organised human society depends — represents the most consequential and least adequately theorised trajectory in contemporary technology development, demanding frameworks of analysis that transcend both the optimistic techno-utopianism and the catastrophist risk literature that currently dominate public and academic discourse on long-range AI futures. This chapter provides a rigorous, empirically grounded, and theoretically integrated examination of the pathways, governance architectures, institutional transformations, and civilizational risks through which advanced AI autonomy is reshaping the foundations of human social organisation at a pace and scale that existing governance frameworks were not designed to address. Drawing upon primary case study evidence from four diverse institutional contexts — a national smart city governance programme, a multinational autonomous finance ecosystem, a federated global health intelligence network, and a sovereign digital governance platform — and evaluated against a validated eight-dimensional Autonomous Digital Civilisation Readiness Framework, the chapter establishes that the most consequential determinants of whether the transition towards autonomous digital civilisation advances human flourishing or amplifies structural inequality, concentrates power, and undermines democratic accountability are not primarily technological but the quality of the governance architectures, value alignment frameworks, democratic deliberation processes, and international cooperation mechanisms through which autonomous AI systems are integrated into the foundational structures of organised human society. Six principal civilizational risk categories — governance deficits and accountability erosion, value misalignment at civilizational scale, digital inequality and structural exclusion, cyber sovereignty and geopolitical fragmentation, economic disruption and labour displacement, and ecological impact of digital infrastructure — are examined in depth, with particular attention to the governance innovations, policy frameworks, and institutional designs whose development is most urgently required to ensure that the trajectory towards autonomous digital civilisation advances human dignity, democratic self-determination, and intergenerational sustainability across the full diversity of human communities affected by this epochal transition.