Article By Frank Bergman
Artificial intelligence (AI) could take control of society without ever going rogue, simply by doing exactly what it was built to do, experts have warned.
The danger is that humans steadily hand over their jobs, decisions, and thinking until they can no longer function without the systems replacing them.
Researchers call the process “gradual disempowerment.”
Its consequences extend beyond unemployment to the erosion of human judgment, practical skills, and the ability to make independent decisions.
“I put gradual disempowerment on the very top of my list,” Jay Chooi, founder and CEO of robotics evaluation organization Robocurve, told CBS News.
“A lot of people feel very powerless, because it requires a lot of effort and a whole-of-society approach to solve it,” Chooi warned.
A Takeover Driven by Convenience
The shift is already visible in everyday life.
Students turn to OpenAI’s ChatGPT for homework.
Programmers use Anthropic’s Claude to produce code.
Personal assistants such as Meta’s Muse bring AI agents into more routine tasks and decisions.
Each service offers convenience.
But researchers warn that repeatedly outsourcing those tasks creates a dependency that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.
Jan Kulveit, a researcher at Charles University’s Center for Theoretical Studies, coauthored the paper that introduced the term gradual disempowerment.
The process “does not need to emerge from a deliberate scheme or power grab by AI systems,” Kulveit wrote.
“In the short-term, it is being incentivized by the perceived value that AI systems can bring to economic, cultural and state functions,” he explained in the paper.
In other words, humans can surrender control voluntarily, one seemingly useful decision at a time.
Losing the Ability to Think Without AI
Experts are already identifying signs of cognitive surrender, particularly among students who allow AI tools to replace their own reasoning.
Research has linked reliance on AI to diminished critical thinking and found lower brain activity during tasks such as AI-assisted essay writing.
The concern is a cycle: people stop practicing a skill, lose proficiency, and become more dependent on the technology performing it.
“If people aren’t actually practicing the skills that the agents are doing for them, they lose the ability to have that skill, and so now you become reliant,” Margaret Mitchell, an AI research scientist at Hugging Face, told CBS News.
That dependency creates another problem when the technology fails.
“What happens when something goes wrong?” Mitchell asked.
“There’s no human you can point to who can fix it.
“So now you’ve become fully dependent on these systems to fix themselves, and what if that’s not possible?” she continued.
The risks already extend beyond classrooms and workplaces.
Reports of people following AI-generated travel instructions into dangerous situations illustrate what happens when users trust a machine’s output without exercising their own judgment.
Automation Could Make Humans Increasingly Powerless
At the economic level, researchers describe a scenario in which increasingly capable AI and robots undercut human labor.
Businesses that retain workers could struggle to compete against companies using cheaper automated alternatives, accelerating the pressure to replace people.
As that process spreads through economic, cultural, and government institutions, humans risk losing both their roles and the expertise needed to reclaim them.
For Chooi, the threat does not require a machine rebellion.
“A lot of people are talking about rogue AI hacking into data centers and taking over the world,” Chooi said.
“But it is not in the mainstream consciousness that AI could literally take over the world just by continuing to do what it’s supposed to do, which is automating everything.”
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