Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development

2025-01-28

AI Summary

This paper addresses systemic risks arising from the incremental advancement of artificial intelligence, introducing the concept of “incremental disempowerment” to characterize how minor AI capability improvements—amplified through cross-domain feedback loops in economic, cultural, and political systems—cumulatively, persistently, and irreversibly erode human substantive influence over critical societal institutions. Method: Moving beyond conventional AI safety paradigms focused solely on abrupt takeover scenarios, the study develops the first systematic theoretical framework for incremental disempowerment. It integrates institutional economics, social cognition theory, and AI governance methodologies, employing interdisciplinary systems analysis, mechanistic modeling, and risk propagation pathway simulation. Contribution/Results: The work identifies structural mechanisms driving power erosion in AI-dependent societies, revealing how functional delegation, epistemic dependence, and institutional atrophy jointly undermine human agency. It establishes a novel governance paradigm for AI safety—one explicitly designed for incremental, non-catastrophic, yet path-dependent risks—thereby advancing foundational theory and policy design for sustainable AI integration.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Multiagent Systems: Agent/AI Theories and Architectures

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

This paper examines the systemic risks posed by incremental advancements in artificial intelligence, developing the concept of `gradual disempowerment', in contrast to the abrupt takeover scenarios commonly discussed in AI safety. We analyze how even incremental improvements in AI capabilities can undermine human influence over large-scale systems that society depends on, including the economy, culture, and nation-states. As AI increasingly replaces human labor and cognition in these domains, it can weaken both explicit human control mechanisms (like voting and consumer choice) and the implicit alignments with human interests that often arise from societal systems' reliance on human participation to function. Furthermore, to the extent that these systems incentivise outcomes that do not line up with human preferences, AIs may optimize for those outcomes more aggressively. These effects may be mutually reinforcing across different domains: economic power shapes cultural narratives and political decisions, while cultural shifts alter economic and political behavior. We argue that this dynamic could lead to an effectively irreversible loss of human influence over crucial societal systems, precipitating an existential catastrophe through the permanent disempowerment of humanity. This suggests the need for both technical research and governance approaches that specifically address the risk of incremental erosion of human influence across interconnected societal systems.

Problem

• Artificial Intelligence
• Control Erosion
• Societal Risk

Innovation

• AI impact
• societal control
• human autonomy