AI 2033 to 2043 – Absorption of Society into System – Part 2 The Hollow Society

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is enjoying a certain popular mythology in 2026 — one of, perhaps, biblical or at least fiscal proportions: the technology valuation bubble, the imminent mass unemployment event, the existential extinction scenario. For clarity, this article is not concerned with conjecture pertaining to stock valuations, unemployment at scale, or AI caused extinction in the catastrophic sense. Rather, this article is concerned with something at once more immediate and more structurally consequential: the ontological absorption of the individual into a system constitutively devoid of selfhood, and what that absorption produces at the scale of society. 1 Part 1 of this series argued that the period 2026–2033 would produce the systemised self: the individual whose identity, knowledge production, and inner life are no longer separable from the AI system that partially constitutes them. Part 2 extends that argument from the individual to the collective. If the systemised self is the condition of the person, the hollow society is the condition of the civilisation that person was supposed to build and sustain. This article examines five interconnected dimensions of societal absorption: the historical trajectory of voluntary technological adoption through which the conditions for absorption were established; the philosophical contexts provided by post-humanism, transhumanism, anti humanism, post-phenomenology, and related ontological inquiry; the architecture of daily life under total mediation; the transformation of governance, economics, and population management; and the anticipated demographic consequences of the absorbed society trajectory, including a projected collapse of the human fertility rate. The article argues that the hollow society does not arrive as catastrophe. It arrives as convenience.

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