Abstract
This study reads the collapse narrative of the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 26) as a causal model of societal breakdown under economic deprivation, and applies it to technological unemployment from artificial intelligence. In the text a ruler arranges protection for his realm but omits one duty, giving property to those without means; poverty spreads and theft follows; each response is followed by escalation, and the sequence ends in seven days of mutual killing. The study does three things with the model. It calibrates it against Cambodia: rural indebtedness and the Samlaut rising of 1967 run its middle stages, while the 1970 coup, civil war and United States bombing are accelerants it does not contain, so the omission reads as an enabling condition rather than a sole cause; the Khmer Rouge, which promised provision and delivered it by violent seizure, reads as the clause's counterfeit. It projects the model onto AI-driven economic displacement (loss of work, then income, then property, then home) and reads the text's two failed responses as two policy reflexes: a transfer that rewards disruption after the fact, and criminalization of the displaced. It argues that a social minimum installed before displacement works as insurance, cheap if displacement never comes and decisive if it does. A further section answers the objection that Cambodia's role in this decade as a host of industrial online fraud refutes the reading, treating it as a low-capacity jurisdiction rented by foreign capital, never as a national character.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The Omitted Clause: AI-Driven Technological Unemployment, the Social Protection Floor, and a Buddhist Model of Societal Collapse", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12030