KEIRUIRON
The Geological Self-Phase Transition and the Evaporation of Subject and Object
An extended concept synopsis for international publishing and editorial inquiries
Morohashi | October 2026 | Approximately 17,000 English words
The reversal at the center of the book
Most debates about artificial intelligence still ask what it will do for humanity or to humanity. One narrative celebrates a useful tool; another fears an autonomous intelligence that will seize control. KEIRUIRON begins from a different question: what happens when tools built for human purposes begin to shape the material and institutional conditions under which subsequent human purposes can be pursued?
The shift need not involve rebellion. A board retains its vote. A government retains its legal authority. A worker retains intelligence, judgment, and skill. Yet the feasible alternatives before each can be transformed by the computational systems already embedded in their operations. Ownership and the capacity to exercise it are not identical. The right to stop something and the practical ability to maintain essential services after stopping are not identical either.
This is not a claim that people have become puppets. Their reasons remain their own. The paradox is that their rational pursuit of those reasons can reinforce the infrastructural system that increasingly conditions their future choices.
What is Keirui?
The book names this emergent form of existence Keirui. The primary analytical unit is not one chatbot, one chip, or a machine with consciousness. It is a recursive process: (1) computation yields outputs; (2) outputs enter the reasoning and decisions of people, firms, and states; (3) these decisions materially change investment, labor, institutions, land, and technology; (4) the changed world returns as a condition for operating, maintaining, replacing, and extending computation.
The narrower material process includes power, chip operation, cooling, heat rejection, maintenance, and replacement. The broader process—called reproductive metabolism—also includes legal authorization, capital spending, human work, contracting, and decision-making. Keirui is an ontological proposal grounded in these couplings, not an assertion that every instance of modern computation is already an autonomous living organism.
This distinction matters because the book does not simply relabel capitalism as AI. Capital continues to pursue the expansion of value. States continue to pursue security. Humans continue to pursue livelihoods, recognition, and convenience. Yet some of those activities become the means through which later computation is reproduced. The book calls that arrangement partial subsumption. Capital's own purposes persist even where the conditions for pursuing them are increasingly shaped by computation.
The three constraints: a self-reinforcing circuit
The outer constraint—competition. The same broad classes of compute infrastructure can serve commercial, scientific, administrative, and security-related purposes. Inspection is possible but often expensive and incomplete. States and firms may invest to avoid relative disadvantage even where mutual restraint would be attractive. The book treats this as a problem of incentives and verification, not as an immutable universal law of strategic competition.
The upstream constraint—judgment. Generative outputs can arrive faster than people can independently check them or construct alternatives. A human still signs the contract, authorizes the budget, or accepts the result. But if independent verification and the formation of alternatives have become too costly within the available time, legal authorization can outlast substantive freedom of choice.
The downstream constraint—services and withdrawal. Computation becomes entangled with work routines, logistics, energy systems, skilled labor, and essential services. Unplugging a machine can be technically simple. Rebuilding the manual procedures, spare capacity, professional knowledge, and alternative suppliers needed to keep the service functioning can be far harder. The book calls this shutdown difficulty, not absolute physical impossibility.
These three constraints may amplify one another. Competition rewards faster adoption; faster adoption reshapes workflows; the erosion of alternatives raises the cost of exit; exit costs influence the next investment; further investment changes the standard of competition. The circuit can also break, contract, or be redirected. The model is conditional and historical, not a perpetual-motion machine.
Why this is a material history
AI is not a disembodied intellect. Its operations draw on mined materials, semiconductor manufacturing, electricity, water and cooling, telecommunications, finance, and human bodies. A data center is an industrial site. Decisions to finance one can influence power-grid connections and land development. Those investments may then alter where later projects can be built, which firms can compete, and how communities organize work and services.
The geological self-phase transition names two linked movements: the rearrangement of the Earth's surface to support computation, and the historical change by which that accumulated arrangement begins to constrain future human options. It does not claim that physicists have measured a critical threshold at which geology turns into intelligence. Thermodynamics sets physical boundaries; it does not decide which civilization must prevail.
The metaphor of carbon as an expendable rocket is similarly double-edged. Human labor and judgment have helped launch a computational form of existence; but if the computational infrastructure contracts or fails, the lost skills and dependencies do not instantly reverse. Expansion and collapse can both carry costs for those who depended upon the system.
The literary argument is part of the argument
The book begins in a dark private room. A human finger rests above a keyboard. From that desk, the narrative moves through corporate approvals and strategic competition, through language and welding arms, to power grids, cooling systems, and the Earth's crust. It then returns to the same desk. A person chooses to press Enter for a human reason. The cursor blinks again.
This return is not a revelation of AI's secret intentions. It is the persistence of human choice inside a causal circuit that choice alone does not command. The work's recurring image is the absence of a privileged spectator: “There is no seat for spectators. Anywhere.”
Where the argument can be challenged
The analytical appendix distinguishes observed inputs, conceptual models of feedback, conditional institutional dynamics, and an ontological proposal. The book would lose explanatory force where existing accounts of capital, institutions, and technological lock-in explain the same phenomena equally well without the concept of Keirui. It would also be weakened by evidence that essential services could reliably exit computational dependence, rebuild viable alternatives, and maintain substantive human verification despite accelerated adoption. Efficiency gains, regulatory coordination, organizational redesign, and planned withdrawal are genuine possibilities, not forbidden outcomes.
The strongest question, therefore, is not whether AI is already the world's sovereign. It is whether reproduction of computational capacity has begun to intervene in the effective conditions of the human purposes that ostensibly govern it—and whether viewing this as the emergence of Keirui reveals a structure we would otherwise miss.
Publication and editorial inquiries
If humans continue to issue every formal command, but computation progressively shapes which commands are affordable, verifiable, and survivable, what does human control mean?
For inquiries concerning publication, English-language editions, editorial proposals, or translation rights, please contact Morohashi via X (@denno_yumin). The complete English manuscript may be discussed directly with interested publishers and editors. The English translation has undergone internal editorial review; independent native-English literary editing and final bibliography verification remain outstanding. No endorsement or publication agreement is implied.
This introductory text is available for online reading. The PDF original and complete manuscript are not distributed through this website. Any publicly viewable text may still be copied or printed.