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 Jan Leike’s revelation about Opus 4.5’s alignment process and explores the deeper implications of humans checking humans checking AI. It argues that the recursive nature of alignment oversight reflects fundamental limitations in human value consistency, and suggests that AI systems may eventually play a role in helping humans apply their own stated values more reliably than they can themselves.

This essay examines Eliezer Yudkowsky’s advice on splitting donations between AI safety organizations and argues that while optimization-focused arguments for concentration may be technically correct, they assume false precision. The case for splitting donations rests on epistemic humility, organizational capture dynamics, the role of luck in wealth accumulation, and the value of decentralization as risk management in environments of deep uncertainty.

This essay examines what chess’s survival and flourishing despite superhuman engines reveals about humanity’s potential relationship with AI. It explores why human chess retained meaning, what choices enabled coexistence, and the harder questions that emerge when we extend this analogy beyond games to work, governance, and society.

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.

The human brain evolved to pursue, not to possess—happiness is neurologically designed to be temporary. The wellness industry profits from this by creating dissatisfaction and selling inadequate solutions, while the genuine correlates of wellbeing (relationships, contribution, autonomy) cannot be productized. The honest path is not finding happiness but accepting its impossibility and pursuing meaning instead.