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.

Social media platforms have industrialized psychology, using decades of research into human irrationality to build systems that exploit our weaknesses at scale. The asymmetry of knowledge - where platforms understand users better than users understand themselves - creates a form of manipulation that individual resistance cannot counter and democratic governance has failed to address. The coming human-AI merge may either deepen this exploitation or, if built on open source principles, finally give humans tools to understand and protect their own minds.