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Policy myopia as a mechanism of gradual disempowerment in Post-AGI governance, Circa 2049

Subramanyam Sahoo

Abstract

Post-AGI information systems won't merely distract governance from important problems. They will systematically transform how institutions make decisions in ways that progressively remove humans from meaningful participation in resource allocation. We show that policy myopia -- the tendency to prioritize visible crises over invisible structural risks -- is not a symptom of poor attention management but a mechanism producing irreversible human disempowerment. Through three entangled mechanisms (salience capture displaces consequentialist reasoning, capacity cascade makes recovery structurally infeasible, value lock-in crystallizes outdated preferences), policy myopia couples with institutional dynamics to create a self-reinforcing equilibrium where human disempowerment becomes the rational outcome of institutional optimization. We formalize these mechanisms through coupled dynamical systems modeling and demonstrate through numerical simulation that these mechanisms operate simultaneously across economic, political, and cultural systems, amplifying each other through feedback loops.

Policy myopia as a mechanism of gradual disempowerment in Post-AGI governance, Circa 2049

Abstract

Post-AGI information systems won't merely distract governance from important problems. They will systematically transform how institutions make decisions in ways that progressively remove humans from meaningful participation in resource allocation. We show that policy myopia -- the tendency to prioritize visible crises over invisible structural risks -- is not a symptom of poor attention management but a mechanism producing irreversible human disempowerment. Through three entangled mechanisms (salience capture displaces consequentialist reasoning, capacity cascade makes recovery structurally infeasible, value lock-in crystallizes outdated preferences), policy myopia couples with institutional dynamics to create a self-reinforcing equilibrium where human disempowerment becomes the rational outcome of institutional optimization. We formalize these mechanisms through coupled dynamical systems modeling and demonstrate through numerical simulation that these mechanisms operate simultaneously across economic, political, and cultural systems, amplifying each other through feedback loops.
Paper Structure (17 sections, 3 equations, 4 figures)

This paper contains 17 sections, 3 equations, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. The Core Claim: Policy Myopia as Disempowerment Mechanism
  2. Three Mechanisms Coupling into Irreversible Disempowerment
  3. Cross-System Disempowerment Cascade
  4. Why Standard Mitigations Fail: The Sufficiency Crisis
  5. Governance Architecture for Human Agency Persistence
  6. Synthesis and the Choice Before Us
  7. Parameter $\delta$: Erosion Rate from Delegation
  8. Parameter $\alpha$: Organizational Atrophy from Disuse
  9. Data and Classification
  10. Results
  11. Three Scenarios
  12. Robustness Conclusion
  13. Limitation 1: Deterministic Model Assumptions
  14. Limitation 2: Single-Institution Case Study
  15. Limitation 3: Parameter Calibration
  16. ...and 2 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Comprehensive causal pathway showing how Post-AGI governance systems and outrage cycles interact to produce irreversible human disempowerment across civilization-scale systems.
  • Figure 2: Prevention-focused institutions show exponential capacity decay under salience-driven governance reaching irreversibility threshold C-bar around year 15-20. Crisis-response institutions expand capacity. Architectural interventions maintaining decoupled capacity streams preserve human institutional capacity across 40-year horizon. Standard mitigations (not shown) delay but do not prevent capacity collapse.
  • Figure 3: Values encoded at t=2026 become progressively misaligned with evolving human preferences by 2050. Systems locked into initial values without contestation mechanisms show 68% welfare divergence. Distributed value forums reduce divergence to 25%. Continuous deliberation with institutional capacity to modify values keeps divergence near baseline. This demonstrates necessity of preserving human institutional capacity for ongoing value contestation.
  • Figure 4: Standard mitigation mechanisms (contestability registers, impact-weighted floors) extend timeline to irreversibility from 18±3 years to 25±4 years but do not change endpoint. Decoupled capacity streams extend to 38±5 years. Full architectural intervention (combining decoupled streams, irreducible deliberation, nested value forums, and system isolation) extends beyond typical policy horizons and shows capacity recovery trajectory. Results suggest procedural mitigations are insufficient; institutional architecture redesign is necessary for meaningful human agency preservation.