A defense of "gradual disempowerment": a reply to Bentham's Bulldog and John Halstead's criticism

Responding to Bentham's Bulldog and John Halstead's criticism of Kulveit et al.'s 2025 paper "Gradual Disempowerment," this article argues the criticism is weak and misses the original paper's core argument. The original paper argues that as more competitive machine alternatives emerge for social functions such as economics, decision-making, artistic creation, and even companionship, human influence steadily erodes, and aligning a single AI system alone is insufficient to stop this process. This article notes that the critics misread the paper's stance on whether disempowerment is an instrumental or intrinsic harm, and overlook the original discussion that AI can serve institutions such as companies rather than individuals, and that the economy may detach from human self-governance.