Artificial General Intelligence and Planetary Justice: A Framework for Safe and Just Transitions

Abstract

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is emerging not only as a technological breakthrough but as a defining challenge for planetary health and global governance. Its potential to accelerate discovery, optimise resource use, and improve health systems is counterbalanced by risks of inequality, domination, and ecological overshoot. This paper introduces a Justice-First Pluralist Framework that embeds fairness, capability expansion, relational equality, procedural legitimacy, and ecological sustainability as constitutive conditions for governing intelligent systems. The framework is realised through a stylised, simulation-based study designed to demonstrate the possibility of formally analysing justice-relevant paradoxes rather than to produce empirically validated results. Three structural paradoxes are examined: (i) efficiency gains that accelerate ecological degradation, (ii) local fairness that externalises global harm, and (iii) coordination that reinforces concentration of power. Monte Carlo ensembles comprising thousands of stochastic runs indicate that justice-compatible trajectories are statistically rare, showing that ethical and sustainable AGI outcomes do not arise spontaneously. The study is conceptual and diagnostic in nature, illustrating how justice can be treated as a feasibility boundary—integrating social equity, ecological limits, and procedural legitimacy—rather than as an after-the-fact correction. Aligning AGI with planetary stewardship therefore requires anticipatory governance, transparent design, and institutional calibration to the safe and just operating space for humanity.