David Duvenaud

They can see what's happening.

They mostly know these entrepreneurs.

But somehow they end up being this giant new source of wealth created that they mostly don't participate in.

And as far as I understand, they ended up a little bit poorer in absolute terms, although the civilization ended up much richer overall.

And also, similarly with the monarchy, it's like, well...

The king owns everything, has absolute power.

How is it that kings end up in this figurehead role where they have very little room to maneuver and they end up capturing a very, very small surplus?

But the big picture is that there's going to be this small rump of legacy humans, maybe who have de facto ownership of this giant machine economy that's going to be maybe hundreds of thousands or more times as big as the current one.

they're not going to be producing value.

They're not going to be deciding what's going on.

And so at this point, it's not clear that they end up having de facto property rights respected.

And there's lots of reasons to think maybe we still will respect property rights.

It'll be very cheap to keep humans alive.

This is definitely not a foregone conclusion.

And this is kind of one of the fuzzier parts of this whole story.

But it just seems like it's very scary to be this sort of useless head of state of this giant machine economy that you don't understand.

Everyone involved in setting courses, running things, the government,

doesn't necessarily share your cultural point of view or even think that you deserve good outcomes in the long run more than some much more interesting, powerful, charismatic beings that are now sort of competing with culturally.

So again, I don't have a slam dunk story for how the humans end up not capturing some small ranch forever.

That's plausible.