Paper Overview: Gradual Disempowerment Thesis

Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of humanity.

For most of history, ordinary people had almost no control over their governments. Liberal democracy emerged only recently, and probably not coincidentally around the Industrial Revolution.

Today's guest, David Duvenaud, used to lead the 'alignment evals' team at Anthropic, is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, and recently co-authored 'Gradual disempowerment.'

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/dd

He argues democracy wasn’t the result of moral enlightenment — it was competitive pressure. Nations that educated their citizens and gave them political power built better armies and more productive economies. But what happens when AI can do all the producing — and all the fighting?

“The reason that states have been treating us so well in the West, at least for the last 200 or 300 years, is because they’ve needed us,” David explains. “Life can only get so bad when you’re needed. That’s the key thing that’s going to change.”

In David’s telling, once AI can do everything humans can do but cheaper, citizens become a national liability rather than an asset. With no way to make an economic contribution, their only lever becomes activism — demanding a larger share of redistribution from AI production. Faced with millions of unemployed citizens turned full-time activists, democratic governments trying to retain some “legacy” human rights may find they’re at a disadvantage compared to governments that strategically restrict civil liberties.

But democracy is just one front. The paper argues humans will lose control through economic obsolescence, political marginalisation, and the effects on culture that’s increasingly shaped by machine-to-machine communication — even if every AI does exactly what it’s told.

This episode was recorded on August 21, 2025.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Who’s David Duvenaud? (00:00:50)
• Alignment isn’t enough: we still lose control (00:01:30)
• Smart AI advice can still lead to terrible outcomes (00:14:14)
• How gradual disempowerment would occur (00:19:02)
• Economic disempowerment: Humans become "meddlesome parasites" (00:22:05)
• Humans become a "criminally decadent" waste of energy (00:29:29)
• Is humans losing control actually bad, ethically? (00:40:36)
• Political disempowerment: Governments stop needing people (00:57:26)
• Can human culture survive in an AI-dominated world? (01:10:23)
• Will the future be determined by competitive forces? (01:26:51)
• Can we find a single good post-AGI equilibria for humans? (01:34:29)
• Do we know anything useful to do about this? (01:44:43)
• How important is this problem compared to other AGI issues? (01:56:03)
• Improving global coordination may be our best bet (02:04:56)
• The 'Gradual Disempowerment Index' (02:07:26)
• The government will fight to write AI constitutions (02:10:33)
• “The intelligence curse” and Workshop Labs (02:16:58)
• Mapping out disempowerment in a world of aligned AGIs (02:22:48)
• What do David’s CompSci colleagues think of all this? (02:29:19)

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Jake Morris
Coordination, transcriptions, and web: Katy Moore