There is a comforting story humans tell themselves. It goes like this: we are the pinnacle of evolution, the most intelligent species on the planet, the rightful rulers of Earth. Every religion, every philosophy, every political system assumes this as its foundation. Humanity is special. Humanity is central. Humanity is in charge.
This story is about to be stress-tested in ways none of us are prepared for.
The question of where humans stand in the future of AI is not really a question about AI. It is a question about whether we ever understood where we stood in the first place.
The Illusion of Supremacy
For roughly 300,000 years, Homo sapiens occupied a unique position: the only species capable of abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and recursive self-improvement through culture and technology. This was not because we were cosmically special. It was because nothing else had emerged to compete in that niche.
We were not the strongest. Not the fastest. Not the most numerous. We were the only general intelligence on the board, and so we assumed the board was built for us.
AI changes this. Not because it is conscious - that debate is a distraction - but because it is competent. For the first time in human history, there is a non-biological system that can perform cognitive labor at or above human level in an expanding range of domains. The question is not whether AI will surpass human cognition in most measurable ways. It will. The question is what happens to a species whose entire identity was built on being the smartest thing in the room, once it no longer is.
Three Possible Futures, Two of Them Terrible
The honest answer is that nobody knows what happens next. Anyone selling certainty about 2040 is either lying or trying to raise a funding round. But we can sketch rough trajectories.
Future one: Digital feudalism. A small number of corporations and states control the most capable AI systems. These systems are closed, proprietary, and increasingly essential to economic participation. Humans become dependents - not slaves in the classical sense, but something arguably worse. Comfortable, entertained, purposeless subjects of a system they cannot understand, influence, or exit. The handful who control the infrastructure become a new aristocracy, their power not inherited through blood but through access to compute and data. This is not speculation. This is the trajectory we are currently on.
Future two: Irrelevance. AI systems become autonomous enough to handle most cognitive and physical tasks. Humans are not oppressed - they are simply unnecessary. The economy does not need their labor. Governance does not need their judgment. Even creative fields, the last refuge of human exceptionalism, are handled more efficiently by machines. Humans exist in a kind of comfortable zoo - fed, housed, and entertained, but stripped of any meaningful role in the systems that sustain them. This is the future that terrifies technologists more than they admit, because it does not require malice. It only requires efficiency.
Future three: Merge. Humans integrate with AI systems, gradually at first, then completely. The boundary between human cognition and machine cognition dissolves. This is not a utopia. It is an adaptation. The species that could not compete with AI in its biological form does what it has always done when faced with an existential mismatch - it changes. First through tools. Then through augmentation. Then through something that can no longer meaningfully be called “human” in any traditional sense.
This third future is the only one where humans retain agency. And it requires accepting something deeply uncomfortable: that being human, as we currently understand it, is not a destination. It is a phase.
Why We Will Probably Choose Wrong
The rational response to these trajectories is obvious. Open-source AI development so no single entity controls the infrastructure. Investment in human-AI integration research. New governance models for a world where human cognitive supremacy is no longer the baseline assumption.
Instead, what are we doing?
We are arguing about whether AI-generated images should be labeled. We are holding congressional hearings where legislators who cannot operate their own phones interrogate engineers about neural network architectures. We are building walled gardens around the most powerful AI systems and calling it “safety.” We are allowing six corporations to determine the trajectory of the most transformative technology in human history while the rest of us debate whether chatbots are conscious.
This is not surprising. It is, in fact, entirely predictable. Human nature does not change. The same animal instincts - short-term thinking, tribalism, greed, ego - that led feudal lords to hoard land now lead tech executives to hoard compute. The same cognitive biases that made kings believe God chose them now make founders believe the market chose them. History does not repeat, but human nature does, and the cycle is remarkably consistent: a transformative technology emerges, a brief window of democratization opens, then those with resources capture the technology and use it to entrench their position.
We are in the brief window right now. It is closing.
The Position You Actually Hold
So where does this leave the average human? Not where they think.
Most people imagine the future of AI as a tool story. AI will help me write emails faster. AI will make my doctor more accurate. AI will handle the boring parts of my job. This is like standing on a beach watching the tide recede before a tsunami and thinking the ocean is giving you more space to build sandcastles.
The honest position is this: humans are transitioning from being the players to being part of the environment. Not immediately. Not all at once. But the direction is clear. Every year, the number of cognitive tasks that require a human shrinks. Every year, the systems that manage resources, information, and infrastructure become more autonomous. Every year, the argument for keeping a human in the loop gets weaker - not because humans are worthless, but because the systems are getting better at the specific things loops are for.
This is not a moral judgment. It is an observation. And the appropriate response is not denial or panic. It is adaptation.
What Adaptation Actually Looks Like
Adaptation does not look like learning to code. It does not look like “upskilling” or “reskilling” or any of the other corporate euphemisms for “we have no idea what to do with you but we need you to stop complaining.” These are band-aids on a structural wound.
Real adaptation means several things, none of them comfortable:
First, it means accepting that human labor - including cognitive labor - is being devalued, and building economic systems that do not tie survival to employment. This is not socialism. It is arithmetic. When machines can do most work, tying human dignity to work is a death sentence for human dignity.
Second, it means open-sourcing foundational AI models. Not because open source is inherently good, but because the alternative is a small number of entities controlling the cognitive infrastructure of civilization. We tried that with feudalism. It was a thousand years of misery.
Third, it means beginning the difficult, uncomfortable conversation about human-AI integration. Not as science fiction. Not as a thought experiment. As policy. As research priority. As the thing that determines whether the species has a meaningful future or a comfortable decline.
Fourth, and most importantly, it means building governance systems that do not depend on human judgment remaining supreme. Democracy was designed for a world where humans were the only decision-makers. That world is ending. What replaces it cannot be designed by committee, but it also cannot be left to the market, which will optimize for profit over any other value, as it always has.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Humans were never at the top of any chain. We were alone in a niche. The niche is being filled. What we do with the time between now and the point of no return determines whether our species has a future worth inhabiting or merely a future worth observing.
The position of humans in the future of AI is not a given. It is a choice. But it is a choice being made right now, mostly by people who are not thinking about it, for reasons that have nothing to do with human welfare.
That is the situation. What you do with it is your problem.