Human Agency Under Threat
Human Disempowerment and Dependency
Erosion of Plural & Local Contextual Knowledge
Top-down AI services are designed for scale and standardization, not local nuance. This results in the marginalization of diverse local & plural intelligences, practices, and traditions, which are often disregarded or overridden by generalized outputs. Dependency on centralized models erodes the capacity of communities to build and sustain intelligences attuned to their own ecological, cultural, and social contexts.
Reinforcement of Hierarchies
Dependency on centralized AI consolidates power in the hands of providers while rendering users subordinate. This creates new hierarchies of control, where those with access to infrastructure dictate the flows of knowledge, while ordinary users are relegated to passive dependence. Such hierarchies replicate and intensify existing social, economic, and political inequalities.
Loss of Collective Learning Capacities
Knowledge is not only individual but collective, built through shared experimentation, discussion, and feedback. Centralized AI bypasses these processes, replacing collective learning ecosystems with centralized knowledge pipelines. This erodes the social fabric of learning and reduces the ability of societies to generate new forms of situated intelligence.
Implications for Human Agency and Freedom
As AGI capabilities become concentrated in few hands, these organizations gain unprecedented power over human decision-making. Their systems increasingly determine what information people see, what opportunities they receive, and what choices appear available. This soft power, exercised through algorithmic mediation of human experience, proves more powerful than traditional forms of control.
The concentration of AGI capability enables new forms of behavioral manipulation and control. Organizations with advanced AI can predict and influence human behavior at scales and subtleties previously impossible. The asymmetry between human and artificial intelligence creates opportunities for exploitation that existing legal and ethical frameworks cannot address. Individual agency erodes in the face of such systems that understand and manipulate human psychology better than humans understand themselves.
The Risk of Ending or Reclaim of Economic Mobility ?
If intelligence becomes centralized property, economic mobility as a principle collapses. Societies lose one of the few remaining mechanisms for reducing inequality. When intelligence itself becomes a commodity controlled by few organizations, traditional paths to economic advancement through education and skill development lose relevance in the fight to reduce inequality. The concentration of AGI capability threatens to erase economic mobility by making human expertise redundant. But this outcome is not inevitable.
When Large AI or AGI systems controlled by few entities can perform most cognitive tasks, the value of human knowledge work plummets across entire sectors. Professionals who spent decades building expertise find their skills suddenly replaceable by systems they cannot access or afford. This affects lawyers, doctors, analysts, programmers, and countless other knowledge workers whose expertise previously provided economic mobility.
Owners of AGI systems capture an ever-growing share of global economic value. As their models expand across industries, they extract profits from healthcare, education, law, finance, logistics, and creative industries alike. Meanwhile, those without control over AGI infrastructures are reduced to consumers, compete for increasingly marginal opportunities or low-value intermediaries. The gap between those who control intelligence and those who depend on it widens into a structural economic chasm. This economic crystallization extends across generations.
What if, instead of enclosing intelligence within corporate silos, AGI infrastructures were designed to be participatory, enabling every individual to contribute their knowledge, skills, and lived experience as part of the collective intelligence system?
Digital Twins of Human Specializations
A participatory AGI ecosystem would allow individuals to create digital twins of their knowledge & expertise - not in a technical, code-heavy manner, Instead, natural interfaces & guided knowledge capture that would allow anyone to shape a specialized AI version of themselves. The act of contribution becomes as simple as sharing lived experience, workflows, or problem-solving approaches, rather than building software. This ensures broad inclusivity, preventing AGI from being the domain of elites alone. Teachers could encode their teaching styles and knowledge; doctors could share diagnostic reasoning patterns; artisans could contribute tacit craft knowledge; workers could input experiential wisdom gained from years of practice. Each person’s unique specialization becomes an active node in the larger AGI Grid.
Discovery and Orchestration of Human-AI Specializations
Once digitized, these individual specializations can be discovered, accessed, and orchestrated by larger AGI agents. Instead of relying solely on monolithic general models, orchestrators or exploring agents could query these human-derived digital twins as specialized modules. Just as economies thrive through the division of labor, AGI ecosystems would thrive through a division of cognitive labor that includes human contributions.
Preserving Economic Pathways
In such a system, individuals do not lose relevance when AGI advances, they gain new relevance. Their skills, judgment, and experience become assets in the AGI commons, continuously discoverable and monetizable. A lawyer’s reasoning patterns, a farmer’s ecological knowledge, a caregiver’s empathy, or a craftsman’s tacit expertise can all be encoded and invoked as specialized intelligence. This creates ongoing economic opportunities where people remain producers of intelligence, not just consumers.
Fighting Inequality Through Democratized Access
By making participation free, open, and democratized, this model keeps alive the paths to advancement that centralized AGI threatens to extinguish. Economic inequality is reduced not by redistributing the leftovers of corporate AGI profits, but by ensuring that everyone can actively contribute to, and share in, the value created by intelligence itself. It transforms AGI from an extractive enclosure into a commons of human specialization, where mobility and opportunity remain possible for all.
The Future of Mobility in the Age of AGI
If AGI is built as a participatory fabric rather than a monolithic commodity, societies can retain mobility as a social principle. Education and skill development remain as valuable inputs into the ongoing growth of a collective intelligence system. Human expertise, far from being displaced, becomes amplified and preserved, ensuring that the fight against inequality does not end with the rise of AGI, but enters a new era of inclusion.