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.

This essay examines the Future of Humanity Institute’s argument that advanced AI poses extinction risk, while proposing that the danger vector runs through flawed human nature rather than AI’s inherent properties. It argues that historical patterns of technology capture by power structures suggest open source AI may be safer than closed systems, despite conventional safety wisdom, because distributed danger is more correctable than concentrated danger controlled by institutions with poor track records.

Humanity faces four possible futures: extinction through uncoordinated technological risk, enslavement under feudal capitalism where tech oligarchs control AI, stagnation where we muddle through without progress, or transcendence through human-AI merge on collective terms. Current trajectories favor enslavement unless the open source imperative prevails and human nature is removed from governance through encoded values rather than trusted willpower.

AI development is concentrated in approximately six organizations, creating a new feudal structure where access to intelligence replaces access to land as the basis for extraction. The only path away from this new feudalism runs through genuinely open source AI, but the historical pattern suggests that technological revolutions deliver new forms of control rather than liberation. The outcome depends on whether distributed alternatives can be built before the window of opportunity closes.

Dawkins and Dennett’s evolutionary lens reveals the true danger of AI: not the machines, but human nature itself. With six corporations steering the human-AI merge, our ancient drives toward greed and tribalism make feudal capture nearly inevitable unless we build decentralized alternatives before the window closes.