AI tools continue to automate more and more aspects of our lives and, in turn, we become more and more dependent on them. Students use ChatGPT to do homework, programmers ask Claude to produce code, and now everyday people are getting a taste of AI agents with the launch of Muse, Meta’s cute personal assistant.
If the trend continues, where does it lead? Some experts who spoke to CBS News We fear that we are on the verge of gradually ceding more control to AI models until we become empty, waiting for decisions from a robot. There is even a name for this phenomenon: “progressive disempowerment”. Its threat goes beyond job displacement, potentially affecting human cognition and action itself.
“I put progressive disempowerment at the very top of my list,” said Jay Chooi, founder and CEO of Robocurve, a public benefit corporation that evaluates the role of robots in the workplace. CBS. “A lot of people feel very helpless, because solving this problem requires a lot of effort and a whole-of-society approach.”
Jan Kulveit, a researcher at Charles University’s Center for Theoretical Studies and co-author of the paper that coined the term progressive disempowerment, argued that it “does not need to emerge from a deliberate plan or takeover by AI systems.”
“In the short term, this is encouraged by the perceived value that AI systems can bring to economic, cultural and state functions,” he wrote in the journal.
This is something many of us have already figured out. The people in our lives who ask an AI to do and plan everything are called “meat proxies”; some are so thoughtless that they let an AI organize a hike that strands them on a notoriously treacherous mountain.
A more extreme view of this scenario depicts AI and robots taking over our jobs as they become a cheaper and more efficient alternative to human labor, driving companies that cling to their human workforce into bankruptcy. However, it doesn’t have to be so drastic to be harmful. Experts are already seeing signs of “cognitive abandonment” among AI users – particularly students – in which they effectively allow an AI tool to supplant their own thinking. Research has linked reliance on AI tools to decreased critical thinking skills and demonstrated that AI leads to decreased brain activity during cognitive tasks such as essay writing.
On a societal level, once we are trapped in this loop, it becomes more difficult to escape.
“If people don’t actually practice the skills that agents are practicing for them, they lose the ability to learn that skill, and now you become dependent,” said Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher at Hugging Face. CBS.
“What happens when something goes wrong?” » she continued. “There’s no human being you can assign to fix the problem. So now you’ve become entirely dependent on these systems to fix themselves, and what if that’s not possible?”
The decisions that AIs are allowed to influence – or even make – are already incredibly consequential. An AI targeting system was allegedly involved in the decision to bomb a girls’ school in Iran, killing more than 150 people, the vast majority children. President Donald Trump was reportedly encouraged to invade Venezuela and capture its president Nicolás Maduro by a conversation with Elon Musk’s Grok.
“A lot of people talk about a malicious AI that would hack into data centers and take over the world,” Chooi said, “but it’s not in the mainstream consciousness that AI can literally take over the world just by continuing to do what it’s supposed to do, which is automate everything.”
Learn more about AI: Anthropic is secretly pressuring the government to shut down an AI model only if it is about to kill more than 50 people
Gn bussni
