Choosing the objective

Every search process needs a fitness function. The question becomes who chooses it, and how that stays legitimate.

Facts

Lane: Trust and governance
Wave: 12 of 12 (build order, not a date)
Needs: 28 boxes all the way back through hard links
Unlocks: 0 boxes downstream through hard links
Leverage: None
Cluster: Trust plumbing and the agent economy
When: Sourced forecast: 2045

Evidence as of October 2026

Gradual Disempowerment frames the end-state risk as people losing influence over the economy, culture and states as AI replaces their labour and thinking.

01Gradual Disempowerment (Kulveit et al.)

Timeline note
No forecast found.

Around it

Needs · 6

Human-agent symbiosisstage · Speculative
Legitimate governancecapability · Speculative
Human influence preservedcapability · Speculative
Cognitive abundancestage · Speculative · helps, not required
Long-latency civilisationstage · Speculative · helps, not required
Verified slowdownstage · Speculative · helps, not required

Unlocks · 0

Nothing further on the map.

Loops and off-ramps

Gradual disempowermentharmful loop
Capex pullbackoff-ramp · cut off
Taiwan chip disruptionoff-ramp · cut off
Power shortfalloff-ramp · cut off
Capability plateauoff-ramp · cut off
Training data ruled outoff-ramp · cut off
Incident-driven haltoff-ramp · slowed
Misuse catastropheoff-ramp · slowed
Alignment failure in deploymentoff-ramp · slowed
Public backlashoff-ramp · slowed

Openings researchers' judgement, October 2026 scouting

Startup room 38/100 · rank 75 of 124 Research room 61/100 · rank 30 of 124

Crowding2 Lab overlap3 Small-team fit3 Buyer today1.5 Research openness5

Depth: light
Players: Meaning Alignment Institute; lab model specs and constitutions
Wedge: Legitimate, scalable aggregation of public values into model specs. research

01Long-term wiki: MAI grant