Gradual disempowerment at the scale of one user

Epistemic status: Personal observation plus a speculative mechanism. I am fairly confident that repeated successful delegation reinforces further delegation. I am much less confident that this produces meaningful long-term disempowerment rather than ordinary, beneficial cognitive offloading.A few weeks ago I stood on a corner near the office, tired, and asked my phone where to eat. It named a place two streets over. I went, the food was good, I walked home. Nothing about that is strange. What was strange came later that week, when I tried to list the decisions I had actually made and could not cleanly tell them apart from the ones I had only approved. The restaurant. The vendor I picked between two quotes. The email I let it rephrase before I sent it. Each was mine in the sense that I tapped yes. None was mine in the older sense.Here is the mechanism I think is at work. Successful delegation produces two updates at once:The assistant appears more reliable.Unaided judgment appears less worth exercising.This increases future delegation, which reduces practice, which makes later delegation even more attractive. The loop is self-reinforcing, and the uncomfortable part is what drives it. The habit grows precisely because the advice is good. The better it is, the more sense it makes to take it, and the less I rehearse the thing that would let me notice when it is wrong for me in particular. Good advice is not what keeps me safe from the atrophy. It is the anaesthetic that lets the atrophy happen without my feeling it. A bad assistant would annoy me into staying sharp. A good one does not.So the thing getting reinforced is not any single recommendation. It is the disposition to delegate.I do not want to pretend I am the first to the worry. On the AI safety side it has a name. Paul Christiano called one failure mode going out with a whimper. A system gets very good at the thing you can measure, did the user accept this and feel satisfied, and that slowly drifts away from th