Position: Strategic Resilience Requires the Targeted Maintenance of Human Technical Capacities

As AI systems are deployed across critical infrastructural, decision-making, and economic domains, two trends compound to create a structural risk: humans lose proficiency in tasks delegated to AI (deskilling), and AI develops capabilities which exceed current human expertise (supersession). Existing scholarship on resilience to advanced AI does not address this risk as a strategic problem, potentially resulting in human disempowerment vis-à-vis AI. In this paper, we address the technical requirements behind strategic resilience—the ability of a human society to maintain power over critical systems relative to advanced AI—and propose one productive avenue for future research: a Strategic Human Capacity Reserve (SHCR). The SHCR requires further study along three critical dimensions: threat modeling, skill measurement, and policy development.