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

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consequentialist reasoning, capacity cascade makes recovery structurally infeasible, value lock-in crystallizes outdated preferences), policy myopia couples with institutional dynamics to create a self-reinforcing equilibrium where human disempowerment becomes the rational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