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

TL;DR

This paper argues that policy myopia in Post-AGI governance systematically disempowers humans by prioritizing visible crises over structural risks, leading to irreversible loss of human participation in decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces a formal model of policy myopia as a mechanism causing human disempowerment, supported by coupled dynamical systems simulations across multiple societal domains.

Findings

Policy myopia creates a self-reinforcing disempowerment cycle.

Simulations show simultaneous operation of mechanisms across systems.

Institutional dynamics amplify disempowerment through feedback loops.

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consequentialist reasoning, capacity cascade makes recovery structurally infeasible, value lock-in crystallizes outdated preferences), policy myopia couples with institutional dynamics to create a self-reinforcing equilibrium where human disempowerment becomes the rational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.