Cognitive Agency Surrender: Defending Epistemic Sovereignty via Scaffolded AI Friction

Abstract

The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence has transformed benign cognitive offloading into a systemic risk of cognitive agency surrender. Driven by the commercial dogma of "zero-friction" design, highly fluent AI interfaces actively exploit human cognitive miserliness, prematurely satisfying the need for cognitive closure and inducing severe automation bias. To empirically quantify this epistemic erosion, we deployed a zero-shot semantic classification pipeline ($τ=0.7$) on 1,223 high-confidence AI-HCI papers from 2023 to early 2026. Our analysis reveals an escalating "agentic takeover": a brief 2025 surge in research defending human epistemic sovereignty (19.1%) was abruptly suppressed in early 2026 (13.1%) by an explosive shift toward optimizing autonomous machine agents (19.6%), while frictionless usability maintained a structural hegemony (67.3%). To dismantle this trap, we theorize "Scaffolded Cognitive Friction," repurposing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) as explicit cognitive forcing functions (e.g., computational Devil's Advocates) to inject germane epistemic tension and disrupt heuristic execution. Furthermore, we outline a multimodal computational phenotyping agenda -- integrating gaze transition entropy, task-evoked pupillometry, fNIRS, and Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modeling (HDDM) -- to mathematically decouple decision outcomes from cognitive effort. Ultimately, intentionally designed friction is not merely a psychological intervention, but a foundational technical prerequisite for enforcing global AI governance and preserving societal cognitive resilience.