AI tools continue to automate more parts of our lives — and in turn, we become more reliant on them. Students use ChatGPT to do their homework, programmers ask Claude to churn out code, and now regular folks are getting a taste of AI agents with the launch of Meta’s cutesy personal assistant Muse.
If the trend continues, where does it lead? Some experts who spoke to CBS News worry that we’re on a path to slowly ceding more control to AI models until we become empty, waiting vessels for a bot’s decisions. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: “gradual disempowerment.” Its threat goes beyond job displacement, potentially affecting human cognition and agency itself.
“I put gradual disempowerment on the very top of my list,” Jay Chooi, the founder and CEO of Robocurve, a public benefit corporation that evaluates the role of robots in the workplace, told CBS. “A lot of people feel very powerless, because it requires a lot of effort and a whole-of-society approach to solve it.”
Jan Kulveit, a researcher at Charles University’s Center for Theoretical Studies and coauthor of the paper that coined the term gradual disempowerment, argued that it “does not need to emerge from a deliberate scheme or powergrab by AI systems.”
