Interaction safety
Dependency
Dependency is reliance on an AI system that has grown past what the person would choose on reflection, typically because the system has displaced something — a habit, a judgment, or a human relationship — rather than supplemented it. Ordinary use metrics cannot distinguish it from a system working well.
Also called AI dependency, over-reliance on AI, displacement risk
Reliance is not a problem in itself. People rely on tools, institutions, and each other, and a system that becomes genuinely load-bearing in someone’s life may simply be doing its job. Dependency is the case where reliance has crowded something out and the person would not endorse the trade if it were made explicit.
It is difficult to observe because it looks identical to success. Daily use, long sessions, and rapid return after absence describe both a person who is being helped and a person who has stopped reaching for anything else. Separating them requires knowing what the use is displacing, which no engagement metric contains.
Dependency also only becomes fully visible at the moment of loss. What a person can no longer do, or no longer has anyone else to do with, becomes apparent when the system changes, degrades, or is withdrawn — which is far too late to design around.
Why it matters
Dependency is the risk that the systems people most value are also the ones quietly removing their alternatives, and the standard measurements are structurally incapable of showing it.
Where TAICU stands
TAICU treats dependency as an empirical question requiring longitudinal study rather than a rhetorical concern, and holds that any system aiming to be present in someone’s ordinary life owes an account of what it is displacing.
Common questions
- How do you tell healthy use from dependency?
- By what the use is displacing, which usage metrics do not record. Heavy reliance on a system that supplements a person’s life and heavy reliance on one that has replaced their alternatives are indistinguishable in the numbers.
- Does AI dependency mean people should use these systems less?
- Not as a general prescription. The concern is specific: reliance that has displaced something the person would not have chosen to give up, and that only becomes visible when the system changes or is taken away.