Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Preprint
Version: v1.0 (Feb 2026)
Structural Intelligence (SI) names a mode of human intelligibility that operates at the level of organization: how meaning, roles, constraints, and coherence are arranged into forms that hold, adapt, fracture, or collapse. This paper argues that the AI era intensifies structural failure modes by making coherence cheap, ranking ambient, and finishedness abundant. Under these conditions, individuals and institutions increasingly substitute coherence for contact: stable narratives replace constraint-coupled revision, and agency becomes vulnerable to signal steering. SI is introduced as a diagnostic vocabulary for distinguishing load-bearing structure from performative coherence and for clarifying corruption mechanisms by which intelligibility becomes rigidity. The aim is descriptive rather than prescriptive: to make visible the structural layer of human reality that is already lived but rarely articulated.
structural intelligence; AI era; coherence; contact; structural failure; performative coherence; agency; sovereignty; ranking signals; maintenance load; epistemic integrity