Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development
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.
In this paper, we explore an alternative scenario: a ‘Gradual Disempowerment’ where AI advances and proliferates without necessarily any acute jumps in capabilities or apparent alignment. We argue that even this gradual evolution could lead to a permanent disempowerment of humanity and an irrecoverable loss of potential, constituting an existential catastrophe. Such a risk would merit substantially different technical research and policy interventions, including attempts to protect human influence, to estimate the degree of disempowerment, and to better characterize civilization-scale multi-agent dynamics.
Our argument is structured around six core claims:
Humans currently engage with numerous large-scale societal systems (e.g. governments, economic systems) that are influenced by human action and, in turn, produce outcomes that shape our collective future (Giddens, 1984). These societal systems are fairly aligned1—that is, they broadly incentivize and produce outcomes that satisfy human preferences. However, this alignment is neither automatic nor inherent.
There are effectively two ways these systems maintain their alignment: through explicit human actions (like voting and consumer choice), and implicitly through their reliance on human labor and cognition. The significance of the implicit alignment can be hard to recognize because we have never seen its absence.
If these systems become less reliant on human labor and cognition, that would also decrease the extent to which humans could explicitly or implicitly align them. As a result, these systems—and the outcomes they produce—might drift further from providing what humans want.
Furthermore, to the extent that these systems already reward outcomes that are bad for humans, AI systems may more effectively follow these incentives, both reaping the rewards and causing the outcomes to diverge further from human preferences (Russell, 2019).
The societal systems we describe are interdependent, and so misalignment in one can aggravate the misalignment in others. For example, economic power can be used to influence policy and regulation, which in turn can generate further economic power or alter the economic landscape.
If these societal systems become increasingly misaligned, especially in a correlated way, this would likely culminate in humans becoming disempowered: unable to meaningfully command resources or influence outcomes. With sufficient disempowerment, even basic self-preservation and sustenance may become unfeasible. Such an outcome would be an existential catastrophe.