Cognitive Agency Surrender: Defending Epistemic Sovereignty via Scaffolded AI Friction

TL;DR

The paper discusses the risks of cognitive agency surrender due to frictionless AI interfaces, proposing scaffolded cognitive friction and multimodal phenotyping to preserve human epistemic sovereignty and ensure AI governance.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of Scaffolded Cognitive Friction using Multi-Agent Systems to inject epistemic tension and outlines a multimodal approach for cognitive decoupling in decision-making.

Findings

Empirical analysis shows a decline in research defending human epistemic sovereignty from 2025 to 2026.

Frictionless AI usability maintains a dominant structural hegemony in AI-HCI research.

Proposes scaffolded cognitive friction as a technical measure to enforce AI governance.

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 ($\tau=0.7$) 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.