Papers

The Convergent Society project develops formal papers alongside the book, essays, and framework materials. These papers provide a more structured and research-oriented treatment of the ideas behind structural divergence, institutional alignment, civic capacity, and human flourishing.

They are intended to support the gradual development of the framework as an intellectual, civic, and applied project.

Structural Divergence and the Crisis of Institutional Alignment in Advanced Democracies

Rolando Azpurua

This paper develops the concept of structural divergence: the growing separation between the capabilities of modern systems and the broader human purposes they are meant to serve.

It argues that many advanced democracies are not merely experiencing isolated crises of inequality, distrust, polarization, loneliness, or institutional failure. Rather, these patterns increasingly appear together as symptoms of a deeper condition: the weakening alignment between economic systems, political institutions, technological development, civic life, and human flourishing.

The paper provides a theoretical foundation for the Convergent Society framework and introduces the need to move beyond critique toward institutional realignment, civic capacity, and organized societal renewal.

Ends and Means: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Social Purpose

This paper develops the concept of normative capacity to analyze a growing asymmetry between the capacity of institutions to adapt and the capacity of societies to reconsider the purposes those institutions serve. Improvement always presupposes a criterion, yet highly adaptive institutions can become increasingly effective at pursuing legible criteria even when those criteria no longer track broader human purposes.

Drawing on organizational learning, experimentalist governance, political theory, and AI alignment, the paper argues that artificial intelligence can deepen this asymmetry by making adaptation to measurable objectives more continuous and potentially self-reinforcing.

Normative capacity is defined as the persistence of institutional mechanisms that keep purposes explicit, contestable, consequential, and answerable to experience.

The argument further derives a minimum legitimacy floor preserving practical agency, a requirement of interpretive plurality against normative compression, and a need to couple normative revision to the pace of adaptation.

The paper concludes that AI alignment must include continuing institutional capacity to revise objectives, not only technical fidelity to inherited ones.