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.

Swedish startup Lovable’s $330M raise at a $6.6B valuation signals institutional belief that natural language will replace traditional coding. This essay explores what that means for software creation, who benefits from democratization, and whether the falling barrier to creation leads to distributed power or new forms of platform control.

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.