Generative-Relational Poverty in an AI Era: A Preliminary Inquiry into Deprivation, Value Formation, and Relational Possibilities

This paper examines significant deprivation within historically changing systems of production, valuation, and social relations, with artificial intelligence providing a contemporary setting rather than a predetermined post-labor future. It investigates three intersecting mechanisms: restrictions on capacities for epistemic and practical engagement; insufficiencies in the conditions through which capacities become exercisable; and involuntary exclusion from consequential practices in which future opportunities and evaluative standards may change. Drawing on capability, social-exclusion, and participatory-parity scholarship, the paper asks whether tracing these mechanisms and their temporal interaction adds explanatory value beyond established accounts. The analysis distinguishes an observed restriction, its causal history, its normative significance, and the assignment of institutional responsibility. Pathway closure alone supplies no sufficient criterion of poverty; material sufficiency, feasible alternatives, consent, voluntary refusal, and the rights of others shape judgment. A selective historical reconstruction precedes examination of interrupted opportunities, the authority of poverty classifications, epistemic scarcity, and conditional institutional remedies. Testimony, administrative records, counterfactual reasoning, privacy, and AI-assisted assessment receive differentiated evidential roles. Comparative tests specify conditions under which the proposed vocabulary should be retained, narrowed, or relinquished. The result is a revisable philosophical research programme, without a validated poverty index or an empirical prediction of universal labor displacement.