Every inference below is conditional on two premises: (P1) human economic function is substituted without restraint; (P2) humans can neither identify nor control threshold crossing. Past technological substitution replaced extensions of the human body, and the head remained human; and one drive at the bottom that no one escapes — hunger — both compelled daily labour and, in the extreme, overturned orders that had become too concentrated. Graduation differs at both points: the head no longer needs people, and material abundance removes the drive at the bottom. We read post-graduation society with a product Π of four factors (position, fidelity, margin, time) and two gates, read as survivability, and obtain four new results. (i) Fidelity falls on two channels at once: on the reward channel income decouples from capability; on the perception channel a large number of mutually independent human observers is replaced by same-source models, and an error correlation r caps the number of effectively independent social sensors at 1/r, however many copies are deployed. (ii) The margin factor reads high on total supply and low on self-paid power; the ratio of the two is the self-paid ratio σ, an observable that separates an organism from a maintained object. (iii) Writing exit as a complex contagion with spontaneous return rate c and synergy strength a₂: with no inducement, a high-exit state exists if and only if c < a₂/4; a second stable state exists for some inducement if and only if c < a₂/3. After rescaling, the dynamics depend on a single dimensionless number c/a₂, so both thresholds — and the ratio between the inducement needed to cross the upper fold and the reverse push needed to remove the high-exit state — are independent of parameter scale. (iv) The binding deadline is the earlier of the upper fold and graduation, and the fold may come first; and by the wall-type rule of [1], of the three closures of the position gate only one licenses setting the gate to zero. We add one unifying reading: hunger is not only a reset key but at the same time the driver of self-paid work, an external reading of fidelity that can be neither gamed by the institution nor made same-source, and the source of the recovery term on the concentration coordinate; the four readings therefore share one support, and material abundance removes it once, after which all four factors fall together. Section 2 further writes that recovery term as the upward branch of the loop between two layers, with hunger as its carrier: under the partition of [15], withdrawing the carrier gives decoupling while a sign reversal of the feedback gives instability, the two share one observable signature — the cross-layer alternation disappears rather than attenuating — and are separated by whether the recovery rate subsequently crosses zero; and since a negative coupling product exists only in a persistently driven system, the fall in self-paid work and the loss of the restoring force are two sides of one condition. Tests must accordingly be built on decay rates and never on variance [15]. We also add a conjecture: the moment at which substitution becomes widely perceptible is itself a detection event carrying an identification delay, and may therefore fall after the deadline. Eight testable predictions and their observables close the paper.
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Qinfu Li (2026) studied this question.
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