Cognitive Agency Surrender: Defending Epistemic Sovereignty via Scaffolded AI Friction

arXiv:2603.21735v2 Announce Type: replace-cross 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-