The "smarter" and more independent your gadgets become, the more you start to feel like you're losing your own freedom.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
Technology's Catch-22? A Theory of Zero-Sum Autonomy
SSRN · 6443080
The Takeaway
We often buy self-driving cars or smart appliances to make life easier, but there's a psychological catch. Our brains treat autonomy as a zero-sum game: if the machine is in charge, we feel less like the masters of our own lives.
From the abstract
Autonomous products-robot vacuums, smart home systems, self-driving vehicles-represent an expanding product class, yet consumer acceptance lags behind technological capability and marketing spending. We introduce the Theory of Zero-Sum Autonomy to explain this gap. The theory's core construct, zero-sum autonomy construal (ZAC), is a relational judgment in which consumers interpret gains in product autonomy as losses of their own autonomy. Consumerautonomous product interaction is susceptible to