The Reference Revolution: AI and the Reconfiguration of the Human System

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the historical significance of generative AI, not merely as a technological innovation or a substitute for intellectual labor, but as a reconfiguration of the connection relationship among individuals, communities, and external functions. Humanity has compensated for individual limitations through the accumulation of functions within communities and the external accumulation of information, knowledge, institutions, technologies, and other functions. This paper defines the “Reference Revolution” as a structural change in which AI expands pathways from communities back to individuals, enabling individuals to explore, reconstruct, integrate, and compare necessary external functions from the standpoint of their own purposes without eliminating this accumulated structure. It then analyzes promoting and resisting pressures arising from both individuals and communities, and proposes three principal conditions affecting the formation and sustainability of the Reference Revolution: Capability, referring to the range of external functions that can actually be used; Security, supporting continued use by constraining serious harm; and Commons, referring to effective opportunities for participation in the formation, use, verification, improvement, and substitution of reference pathways. These three conditions are treated not as fixed optima or necessary and sufficient conditions, but as interacting state dimensions. The paper further examines possible changes in individual decision pathways, community functions, democracy, states, firms, and other social structures, and proposes an institutional response to the observational limits generated by the aggregation of local rationalities. The argument does not claim the inevitable completion of the Reference Revolution or the inevitability of any specific institutional form. Rather, it presents a direction of structural change derived from currently observable conditions together with the conditions under which that change may form and persist. This work is the English edition of the Japanese original, 参照革命――AIはなぜ人類史上最大級の構造変化なのか (Version 1.1, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22004276).