Cognitive Agency Surrender: Defending Epistemic Sovereignty via Scaffolded AI Friction

Abstract

The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence has transformed benign cognitive offloading into a systemic risk of cognitive agency surrender. Driven by the commercial dogma of "zero-friction" design, highly fluent AI interfaces actively exploit human cognitive miserliness, prematurely satisfying the need for cognitive closure and inducing severe automation bias. To empirically quantify this epistemic erosion, we deployed a zero-shot semantic classification pipeline ($τ=0.7$) on 1,223 high-confidence AI-HCI papers from 2023 to early 2026. Our analysis reveals an escalating "agentic takeover": a brief 2025 surge in research defending human epistemic sovereignty (19.1%) was abruptly suppressed in early 2026 (13.1%) by an explosive shift toward optimizing autonomous machine agents (19.6%), while frictionless usability maintained a structural hegemony (67.3%). To dismantle this trap, we theorize "Scaffolded Cognitive Friction," repurposing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) as explicit cognitive forcing functions (e.g., computational Devil's Advocates) to inject germane epistemic tension and disrupt heuristic execution. Furthermore, we outline a multimodal computational phenotyping agenda -- integrating gaze transition entropy, task-evoked pupillometry, fNIRS, and Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modeling (HDDM) -- to mathematically decouple decision outcomes from cognitive effort. Ultimately, intentionally designed friction is not merely a psychological intervention, but a foundational technical prerequisite for enforcing global AI governance and preserving societal cognitive resilience.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: The Epistemic Skew and Agentic Takeover in High-Confidence HCI Literature (2023 -- March 9, 2026). A deep-learning-based semantic stance classification of 1,223 highly confident, AI-related papers (filtered via a rigorous $\tau=0.7$ threshold from an 8,000-paper ontological baseline retrieved via the OpenAlex API). The analysis reveals the persistent, systemic prioritization of the frictionless paradigm (optimizing efficiency and reducing cognitive load). Crucially, a granular semantic breakdown exposes a recent "agentic takeover": a brief 2025 surge in research defending strict human cognitive sovereignty (19.1%) was abruptly suppressed in early 2026 (13.1%) by an explosive shift toward optimizing machine autonomy and autonomous AI agents (19.6%). This dynamic structural divergence empirically quantifies the escalating marginalization of human epistemic agency in contemporary human-AI interaction design.
• Figure 2: The Two-Dimensional Evaluation Space Model for Cognitive Agency. The X-axis represents the delegation of sensemaking control (AI Dependency), while the Y-axis represents the depth of epistemic tension and analytical load (Cognitive Friction). Long-term interaction within the Cognitive Agency Surrender quadrant drives systemic cognitive atrophy. In contrast, Synergistic Synthesis utilizes structured friction to break the zero-sum fallacy of automation, preserving epistemic sovereignty through Meaningful Human Control (MHC).
• Figure 3: Causal Pathway of Human-AI Synergistic Synthesis. Unlike conventional consensus-driven workflows (upper section) that promote premature cognitive closure and heuristic acceptance, the scaffolded cognitive friction framework (lower section) utilizes heterogeneous agents and a Devil's Advocate to expose structured contradictions. This injected epistemic tension elevates visual sampling entropy, forcibly awakening System 2 analytical reasoning to adjudicate logical trade-offs and preserving the human decision-making locus.