Policy myopia as a mechanism of GRADUAL DISEMPOWERMENT in Post-AGI governance, Circa 2049

Subramanyam Sahoo

Track: Track 2: Socio-Economical and Future Visions

Keywords: AGI governance, Gradual disempowerment, policy attention allocation, alignment, democratic accountability, governance capacity, value lock-in

TL;DR: We formalize policy myopia as a driver of institutional disempowerment under post-AGI automation and propose measurable early-warning indicators.

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makes recovery structurally infeasible, value lock-in crystallizes outdated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
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.

Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.

Submission Number: 40