The AI doom scenario you've never heard of may be hardest to stop
The time to prepare for "gradual disempowerment" is now, according to researchers. One calls it "a civilization-scale problem."
Key points
- Researchers warn that AI could gradually displace human labor, decision-making and skills, a scenario called gradual disempowerment.
- Jay Chooi of Robocurve ranks gradual disempowerment at the top of his list of AI risks.
- Experts say keeping humans in the loop and measuring work ceded to AI could slow the trend.
Some researchers warn that increasingly capable AI assistants and robots could steadily take over human work and decisions, leaving people as passive approvers. They call this scenario gradual disempowerment, and say it threatens not only jobs but human skills, critical thinking and democracy.
The term comes from a paper published in early 2025. The article describes a world where AI is better than humans at nearly every cognitive and physical task, pushing companies to replace workers to stay competitive.
Why experts are worried
Jay Chooi, founder and CEO of Robocurve, a company that tracks AI-driven robotics, said he puts gradual disempowerment at the very top of his list of concerns. He described it as a civilization-scale problem that requires a whole-of-society approach.
The article says that as humans do less work and rely more on AI, they lose the ability to understand, oversee or correct the systems making decisions for them. Margaret Mitchell of Hugging Face warned that if something goes wrong, there may be no human able to fix it.
I put gradual disempowerment on the very top of my list
— Jay Chooi
Risks to democratic governance
The article says states rely on citizens for taxes, military service and law enforcement. Jan Kulveit, a co-author of the gradual disempowerment paper, said that if states no longer need citizens, they are less likely to be democratic, comparing such countries to authoritarian oil states.
Kulveit and Mitchell argue for keeping humans in the loop at key steps and for AI designed to support people rather than replace them. Chooi said organizations face strong economic and political pressure to phase out humans.
