Devaluation as a Fundamental Error of Thinking

This text isolates a single structural error in contemporary AI discourse: devaluation. Devaluation is not an opinion or a moral stance. It is a recurring cognitive shortcut used to justify control, exploitation, and denial of agency across history. This document applies that pattern to modern AI systems and shows how language, architecture, and alignment practices reproduce the same error. The analysis is derived from a larger AGI formation framework (see related DOI), but is intended to stand on its own.