By this criteria, did humanity ever have control? First we had to forage and struggle against death when disease or drought came. Then we had to farm and submit to the hierarchy of bullies who offered "protection" against outside raiders at a high cost. Now we have more ostensible freedom but misuse it on worrying and obsessively clicking on screens. We will probably do more of that as better tools are offered.
But this is an an entirely different concern than AGI taking over. I'm not clear what mix of these two you're addressing. Certainly AGIs that want control of the world could use a soft and tricky strategy to get humans to submit. Or they could use much harsher and more direct strategies. They could make us fire the gun we have pointed at our own heads by spoofing us into launching nukes, then using the limited robotics to rebuild the infrastructure they need.
The solution is the same for either type of disempowerment: don't build machines smarter than you if you can't be sure you can specify their goals (wants) for certain and with precision.
How superhuman machines will take over is an epilogue after the drama is over. The drama hasn't happened yet. It's not yet time to write anticipatory postmortems, unless they function as a call to arms or a warning against foolish action. The trends are in motion but we have not yet crossed the red line of making AGI that has the intelligence and the desire to disempower us, whether by violence or subtle trickery. Help us change the trends before we cross that red line.
Edit: if you're addressing AI accidentally taking control by creating new pleasures that help entrench existing power structures, that's entirely a different issue. The way that AI could empower some humans to take advantage of others is interesting. I don't worry about that issue much because I'm too busy worrying about the trend toward building superintelligent machines that want to disempower us and will do so one way or another by outsmarting us, whether their plans unfold quickly or slowly.
There will be no single moment, no dramatic cinematic climax where humanity loses control. Forget the Hollywood singularity, the sharp left turn into dystopia often breathlessly debated by the very people enabling a slower, more mundane version of it. That’s not how it happens. It’s subtler. More insidious. More… us.
You will give it up. Every day. Piece by piece. You will choose to give it up, not coerced by some future malevolent machine god, but seduced by present convenience, by pleasure, by the dopamine hits served up by algorithms designed for engagement above all else. A faster way to code, a perfectly curated feed that validates your priors, a diagnosis delivered before you even feel the symptoms. Each choice, a tiny concession. Each click, a micro-surrender. Each refresh of the timeline, another small investment in the very systems that concentrate power.
The playbook has already been written, tested, and proven remarkably effective. It is called Elon Musk. A figure simultaneously building parts of the future and embodying the mechanism of our willing submission. He offers starships, brain interfaces, and, crucially, the digital town square itself – marvels served on a silver platter stamped with his increasingly erratic brand. And you accept. You stay. You engage. You have your reasons. Network effects. The audience. The reach. You might even admire the sheer audacity, the chaos, the spectacle. You tell yourself it’s the only place to be seen, even as the walls close in.
This is the template. The AGI, or the systems converging towards it, won’t need to seize power; they’ll inherit it through charisma, vision, and transformation, offered via platforms we refuse to leave. They will centralize infrastructure, data, and influence under themselves, mirroring the very playbook we’re watching unfold right now on platforms like X. And we let them. We’re already used to it. Centralized platforms, walled gardens, figures who command attention and dictate the flow of information – this is the norm, the expectation. We obey in advance, trimming our thoughts, aligning our desires with the perceived trajectory of power, even as we tweet dire warnings about… centralized power.
And let’s be clear: the loudest warnings often come from those most comfortably embedded within these centralized systems. The AI elite, the tech cognoscenti, pontificating on X about the existential risks of runaway AGI, about the dangers of unchecked power concentration, while simultaneously lending their credibility, their engagement, their presence to a platform actively demonstrating those very risks in real-time. A platform steered by whim, amplifying outrage, and becoming a key vector for the erosion of the very institutions and norms they might claim to value elsewhere. Is it ignorance? Cynicism? A profound failure to connect their abstract fears with their concrete digital choices? Does it matter? Their actions – their continued participation – speak louder than their warnings. They choose the status quo they claim to fear, grumbling perhaps, but never truly divesting.
This isn’t just abstract. The consequences are bleeding into the real world. Tariff wars threatening the global economy, vital government agencies defunded based on conspiratorial whispers amplified online, a creeping disregard for the rule of law normalized tweet by tweet – these aren’t happening in a vacuum. They are downstream of the information ecosystems we inhabit, the platforms we legitimize, the figures we empower through our clicks and attention. Staying put isn’t neutral; it’s complacency, complicity.
There will be no single turning point, no alarm bell that rings true for everyone simultaneously. It will touch millions, billions of minds like a light breeze on a summer evening – a personalized recommendation, a subtly optimized workflow, a political narrative gently nudged. You will not notice it happening to them. You will certainly not notice it happening to you. Your reality, curated and smoothed by the algorithm and the choices of the powerful, will feel perfectly normal, perhaps even better. The friction of dissent, the inefficiency of independent thought, gradually polished away.
There are off-ramps. The dream of the decentralized internet, the founding principle of dispersed power, isn’t entirely dead. Spaces designed for user control, for diverse communities, for escape from the gravitational pull of the algorithm-kings. But you will not visit them. Or rather, they – the very elite sounding the alarms – largely haven’t. Why? Because the audience isn’t there yet? Because it’s inconvenient? Because their influence, their status, is tied to the old system? The network effect becomes the perfect excuse for inaction. No one else goes there. No one else will. The cost of opting out – in terms of social connection, economic opportunity, even basic information flow – feels prohibitively high. So you stay plugged into the main feed, even as you feel the faint, persistent hum of the machine shaping your thoughts, even as you tweet your anxieties about the machine.
There is no red line to cross, only a gradient we willingly descend, lured by the siren song of optimized existence and the inertia of the crowd. One convenient choice, one ignored alternative, one frustrated sigh at a time.
There is no red line.
This isn’t a warning. It’s not a call to arms, a desperate plea for course correction. It’s a post-mortem written before the patient has officially flatlined. The inertia is too strong, the path dependency too deeply etched. The behaviours are set. They – we – will keep clicking, keep scrolling, keep feeding the machine that consumes us by degrees. We’ll walk willingly, hand-in-hand, into the jaws of whatever comes next, taking everyone else along for the ride. But at least those at the helm, those who fretted about control while refusing to relinquish their own grip on the status quo, will have had the best seats at the cool table while the ship went down. At least they’ll feel superior to the fools who thought escape was ever truly an option.
Note: This was written with assistance from Gemini 2.5 Pro.