Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development

post by Jan_Kulveit, Raymond D, Nora_Ammann, Deger Turan (deger-turan-1), David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) (capybaralet), David Duvenaud (david-duvenaud) · 2025-01-30T17:03:45.545Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

This is a link post for https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/

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Full version on arXiv | X

Executive summary

AI risk scenarios usually portray a relatively sudden loss of human control to AIs, outmaneuvering individual humans and human institutions, due to a sudden increase in AI capabilities, or a coordinated betrayal. However, we argue that even an incremental increase in AI capabilities, without any coordinated power-seeking, poses a substantial risk of eventual human disempowerment. This loss of human influence will be centrally driven by having more competitive machine alternatives to humans in almost all societal functions, such as economic labor, decision making, artistic creation, and even companionship.

A gradual loss of control of our own civilization might sound implausible. Hasn't technological disruption usually improved aggregate human welfare? We argue that the alignment of societal systems with human interests has been stable only because of the necessity of human participation for thriving economies, states, and cultures. Once this human participation gets displaced by more competitive machine alternatives, our institutions' incentives for growth will be untethered from a need to ensure human flourishing. Decision-makers at all levels will soon face pressures to reduce human involvement across labor markets, governance structures, cultural production, and even social interactions. Those who resist these pressures will eventually be displaced by those who do not.

Still, wouldn't humans notice what's happening and coordinate to stop it? Not necessarily. What makes this transition particularly hard to resist is that pressures on each societal system bleed into the others. For example, we might attempt to use state power and cultural attitudes to preserve human economic power. However, the economic incentives for companies to replace humans with AI will also push them to influence states and culture to support this change, using their growing economic power to shape both policy and public opinion, which will in turn allow those companies to accrue even greater economic power.

Once AI has begun to displace humans, existing feedback mechanisms that encourage human influence and flourishing will begin to break down. For example, states funded mainly by taxes on AI profits instead of their citizens' labor will have little incentive to ensure citizens' representation. This could occur at the same time as AI provides states with unprecedented influence over human culture and behavior, which might make coordination amongst humans more difficult, thereby further reducing humans' ability to resist such pressures. We describe these and other mechanisms and feedback loops in more detail in this work.

Though we provide some proposals for slowing or averting this process, and survey related discussions, we emphasize that no one has a concrete plausible plan for stopping gradual human disempowerment and methods of aligning individual AI systems with their designers' intentions are not sufficient. Because this disempowerment would be global and permanent, and because human flourishing requires substantial resources in global terms, it could plausibly lead to human extinction or similar outcomes.

 

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