Scofti
In a bright, spotless hammer factory, rows of white robot arms hammer and pack hammers into boxes, and no people are working. In the middle, on a round platform labelled HUMAN IN THE LOOP, a man in a yellow hard hat and hi-vis vest sits on a stool beside a pedestal with one big green button marked APPROVE, covered in dust. He is gazing up, smitten, at a reporter in a white SCOFTI crop top, a purple sequin skirt and black knee boots, who holds a SCOFTI microphone out to him while a robot films her. She says, "Tell our viewers what you do here." He says, "I'm the human in the loop." A grey toy with a big iridescent bubble head stands beside them, arms folded, and says, "He hasn't looked at the button in weeks." High on the back wall, an old sign reads HAMMERS MADE, a patch of fresh white paint, SINCE 1952.

No One Has Made a Movie

How people lose control of the world without a single robot rising up.

It has a name: gradual disempowerment. Nobody has to want it.

  1. The paper. Jan Kulveit and five co-authors: it "does not need to emerge from a deliberate scheme or powergrab by AI systems."

  2. The pressure. Firms that swap people for AI win. "Those who resist these pressures will eventually be displaced by those who do not."

  3. July. An Epoch AI survey of 1,106 employed US adults: 20% say AI now handles at least one task they used to hand to a coworker or contractor. That is one task out of ten asked about, not a lost job.

  4. August 24. Margaret Mitchell's paper, AI Agents Push Humans Out of the Loop: leaning on AI wears down the very skills it takes to check it.

  5. Nobody to call. Mitchell: "What happens when something goes wrong? There's no human you can point to who can fix it."

  6. The state. Kulveit: "If, or when, existing states don't need their citizens, they're less likely to be democratic."

  7. October 19. Kulveit: "Currently, the AIs are implicitly trained to be a replacement for humans."

Jay Chooi of Robocurve: "No one has made a movie about gradual disempowerment."

Just don't miss a year