About a year ago, we wrote a paper that coined the term “Gradual Disempowerment.”
It proved to be a great success, which is terrific. A friend and colleague told me that it was the most discussed paper at DeepMind last year (selection bias, grain of salt, etc.) It spawned articles in the Economist and the Guardian.
Most importantly, it entered the lexicon. It's not commonplace for people in AI safety circles and even outside of them to use the term, often in contrast with misalignment or rogue AI. Gradual Disempowerment tends to resonate more than Rogue AI with people outside AI safety circles.
But there's still a lot of confusion about what it really is and what it really means. I think it's a very intuitive concept, but also I still feel like I don’t have everything clear in my mind. For instance, I think our paper both introduces the concept and presents a structured argument that it could occur and be catastrophic. But these things seem somewhat jumbled together both in my mind and the discourse..
So for reasons including all of the above, I plan to write a few posts on the topic, starting with [...]
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
April 4th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W9XQ9CcMTbZQa33eP/ten-different-ways-of-thinking-about-gradual-disempowerment
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
