Leviathan: From Agriculture to Artificial Intelligence——Techno-Political Economy and Reflections on the Continuity of Human Civilization

With the evolution of human society, the Hobbesian metaphor of the state as “Leviathan” has continuously acquired adaptive transformative capacities. The iteration of Leviathan reveals a profound paradox in techno-politics: humanity relies on powerful systems to address civilizational risks, yet simultaneously fears the runaway power of technology. From the Agricultural Revolution to the AI revolution, humans have perpetually repeated the historical cycle of “spinning cocoons to bind ourselves”. The agricultural civilization shaped the earliest control paradigm through a three-dimensional framework of “resources-information-organization”. The legacy of the industrial Leviathan lies in its creation of an operating system for assembly-line control paradigms. The dominance of the digital Leviathan stems from humanity's fatal obsession with efficiency. The true architects of controlling Leviathan are not engineers, but the social selection mechanisms of each era. To break the cycle of self-entrapment, humanity must rewrite the “life code” of technological evolution: replacing the logic of “efficiency supremacy” with values of “ecological symbiosis”, substituting “algorithmic transparency” for “data black boxes” as the cornerstone of civilization, and countering the disciplinary violence of “cognitive standardization” with “neurodiversity”. Only then can the torch of human civilization illuminate the future.