The AI doom scenario you’ve never heard of may be the hardest to stop

October 19, 2026 / 11:33 AM EDT / CBS News

It seems that almost daily, a big tech company releases a new AI-driven digital assistant. Muse by Meta, Gemini by Google, dots by OpenAI. By the time this article is published, a new one from [insert tech company here] will probably have a press release touting its ability to manage your work and life — to take things off your plate, automate your processes, speed up your tedious tasks. It sounds helpful and, to lower the bar, harmless.

But some researchers say this is the beginning of a treacherous path for humankind, one where bots take more and more off our plate until all that's left is an empty vessel, and we human users become nothing more than thoughtless "approvers."

It's not just a threat to jobs. They warn that allowing our skills and knowledge to deteriorate, and surrendering our critical thinking to AI, poses an existential danger to humanity.

One term for this path is "gradual disempowerment" — a scenario where AI displaces human labor in the economy, replaces human decision-making in all key societal concerns, erodes human creativity, and degrades human cognition along the way.

And though the…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/entertainment/