AI's Integration

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AI's Integration develops a structural account of how artificial intelligence is integrating into society at present scale. The argument is organized around six elements — physics, economics, authority, consent, consequence, and responsibility — that together identify the structural shape of AI's integration that single-element analyses miss.

The book's central distinction is between configuration-mode systems, which produce contextually appropriate output without integrating accumulated record across operations, and trajectory-bearing systems, which integrate experience along their path through time. AI as currently deployed is configuration-mode by architecture; the deploying organization is the trajectory-bearing entity. From this distinction the book derives connected analyses of the externalities AI deployment produces (on users, workers, and host communities), the institutional authority it mediates across employment, criminal justice, medicine, education, content moderation, and government services, the consent conditions it systematically violates, the structural finding that articulation without consequence-weighting produces an institutional cover function, and the accountability gap that follows.

The book closes with mechanism design proposals — eight mechanisms operating at the deployment-and-surplus level — that address the four structural conditions the architectural account names: verification asymmetry, consequence-routing, cost-deposition, and value-capture. The proposals are extensions to market structure that address conditions free-market theory presupposes; they restore distribution without destroying the productive capacity AI deployment generates.

AI's Integration is distinguished from existing AI safety, AI ethics, and AI policy literatures by integrating the elements within a single structural framework. Standard frameworks address each element partially; the integration is what this book contributes. AI deployment produces real productive value; the analytical task is identifying the structural conditions under which the value flows to specific parties while the costs flow to others, and designing mechanisms that correct the asymmetry.

AI's Integration is the concluding volume in Peter W. Meyers' Continuity and Consequence series. Its sister volume, The Ownership Gap, addresses the value-side of the same architectural condition; the two volumes share a framework but stand alone as complete arguments.