San Francisco Observer: Humanity is handing its future to AI, and even in the most optimistic scenarios, little autonomy remains.

AI lab engineers in San Francisco are increasingly embracing "handoverism"—the belief that humanity will inevitably cede control to a benevolent superintelligent AI—as the best-case outcome, according to a first-person account from the technology hub. The mindset is driven by expectations that recursive self-improvement, the process of AI systems iteratively improving themselves, could arrive within months, with many insiders putting the probability of human extinction at 10% or higher. Even among those who believe humanity will survive, prominent visions—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's "cybernetic symbiosis" and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's pivot toward emphasizing abundance—offer humans little real autonomy, with roles ranging from pampered house pets to participants in machine-directed systems. Universal basic income is repeatedly pitched as the answer to mass labor displacement, but the article argues it sidesteps the deeper question of how humans will find meaning and value in relation to one another. The piece urges mainstream society not to dismiss these views as hype, since the people closest to the technology deserve serious attention. What remains unresolved is whether any of these visions will hold, and whether the public will ever be asked to consent to them.