Post-AGI Social Impacts #002: On Gradual Disempowerment
🤷♂️ Who Are We?
We are a community of professionals who meet once a month to discuss the societal challenges of AI deployments and explore how to create positive and meaningful post-AGI* futures. Read more about our group here.
🤔 What Is This Event About?
As AI advances, new systems could gradually replace human roles in decision-making, labor, creativity, and governance. These shifts may seem subtle at first, but over time, they could erode human agency in ways that are difficult to reverse.
While many discussions focus on sudden AI takeovers, this session explores a slower but equally impactful risk, which is the the gradual loss of human influence over economic, political, and cultural systems.
This month, we’ll dive into this issue and explore how we might respond.
📌 Topics We’ll Cover
How can AI-driven changes in one sector reinforce disempowerment across others?
Why is disempowerment a systemic issue and not just an AI alignment problem?
What strategies could preserve human agency in an AI-dominated world?
📖 Pre-Reading
To get the most out of the discussion, we recommend reading this paper on Gradual Disempowerment (Kulveit et al., 2025) before the session.
👥 Who Is This Discussion Group For?
People concerned about these societal issues and committed to finding solutions.
Those who work on (or want to integrate) social aspects of AI into their field (technical professionals welcome!).
Plus but NOT a must: A humanities background or experience in NGOs, academia, or governance.