Humans were never at the top of an intelligence hierarchy - they were alone in a niche that AI is now filling. The essay outlines three possible futures (digital feudalism, irrelevance, or human-AI merger), argues that only the merger path preserves human agency, and warns that the window for choosing correctly is closing while human nature drives us toward the worst outcomes. The position of humans in AI’s future is not predetermined but is being decided right now, mostly by those optimizing for the wrong things.

The AI economy is not creating a new economic order but accelerating the oldest one - feudalism with computational monopoly replacing land ownership. The concentration of AI capability in a handful of corporations, combined with the historical pattern of technological revolutions being captured by existing power structures, suggests a feudal outcome unless open source AI provides a structural counterforce. The question is not whether AI creates or destroys jobs, but who owns the intelligence infrastructure that will mediate all economic activity.

An unflinching examination of the gap between humanity’s stated values and revealed preferences. The essay argues that humans are fundamentally driven by animal impulses (@nefs) that override our higher reasoning, and that every system we build eventually gets captured by these same impulses. The narrow path forward may lie not in changing human nature, but in building AI and decentralized systems that can encode our stated values more consistently than we ever could ourselves.