Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Preprint
Version: Latest archived (Mar 2026)
In the AI era, technology has industrialized the production of weightless coherence, allowing systems to appear ordered while thinning their actual answerability to reality. This paper argues that technology is not best understood as a moral agent or an independent destiny. It is better understood as a structural amplifier: it scales the governing intent and answerability level of the system into which it is inserted. Read through Structural Intelligence, technology becomes either an engine of capture or an aid to answerability depending on whether it intensifies cheap coherence, reward-pressure, and control without revision, or instead increases reality-contact, traceability, corrigibility, and consequence-bearing repair. The paper traces this problem from Plato’s Republic to modern platform and AI conditions, arguing that technology always carries a political and epistemic form: it redistributes who can see, who can correct, who can refuse, and who pays. The result is a structural criterion for evaluating technology not by novelty or power alone, but by whether it strengthens answerability under pressure.
technology; structural intelligence; answerability; cheap coherence; reality-contact; AI; platforms; governance; capture; epistemology; corrigibility; consequence