Human Capacity-Building as AI Governance Strategy: Agency, Dependency, and the Stewardship Bottleneck

Current AI governance discourse focuses on technical alignment, regulation, and institutional oversight — necessary priorities that share an unexamined assumption: that the humans inside governance systems possess the cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities needed to govern technologies of unprecedented power. This paper argues that human capacity-building deserves serious attention as a complementary governance strategy. It proposes a central distinction between agency-building and dependency-building interventions, and uses that distinction to evaluate three paths: assisted therapeutic intervention, cognitive enhancement, and early educational development. The analysis spans neuroscience, psychopharmacology, education, contemplative practice, and governance theory. The conclusion is not that any single intervention will solve AI risk, but that human capacity is a governance variable that can no longer be treated as a background assumption.