The Human-AI Delegation-Verification Dilemma: Individual Strategies, Collective Equilibria and Sociotechnical Lock-in

Abstract

This paper takes an ecological approach toward large-scale models of hybrid human-AI intelligence. Emerging models of human-AI interaction predominantly advance the complementarity thesis variously dubbed human-AI collaboration and human-AI hybrid intelligence. However, this constitutes an over-simplification of the modalities of human-AI interaction and possibility-space for both individual and collective action that human-AI interaction potentiates. To fill these gaps, this paper develops a decision and game-theoretic approach to the human-AI delegation-verification dilemma. First, we map out canonical decision-theoretic strategies that account for adaptive user trajectories, modeling how agents transition between strategies based on interaction feedback to reach stable equilibria. Second, we scale individually stable strategies to collective equilibria using three extrapolation principles: (a) non-communicative aggregation (b) local social signaling and (c) institutional norms setting. The analysis identifies the emergence of sociotechnical lock-in, a macro-behavioral state where individually adaptive delegation, in the absence of communicative and institutional safeguards, aggregates into a systemic collective action problem modeled as a prisoner's dilemma that degrades shared epistemic standards. We argue that adoption under higher communicative standards and institutional norms can mitigate suboptimal collective equilibria by imposing social commitments on individual users.