I. The Importance of the Human

After I finished writing about that replaced horse in the last piece, one comment stayed with me for a long time.

A friend wrote: humans have a human flavor, horses have a horse flavor, and that is the spirit; this is a civilization-level problem, and the problem is what choices humanity has handed away.

I answered him.

Yes — and the thing is, if you look at this moment, no one has handed away much. Each person gives up only a little, but the border keeps moving. You can notice it: over these years people's demand for the quality of their entertainment keeps dropping. When I was younger we still walked into a cinema for a better image and better sound; now most people finish a whole film on a phone screen, and some don't even watch the film — they watch someone else explain it to them. Fifteen years ago that would have been unthinkable.

So what has actually been traded away may take half a generation to be noticed. And by then, that generation's values can no longer be measured by the values of this moment.

Right now, you and I both agree that the human flavor matters. But we judge it to matter on the strength of values inherited from the past. And the reason "the human" matters at all is a value that only grew after the fifteenth-century Renaissance — when humanity turned its gaze away from God and back onto itself. It was not always so. In that sense, your values and mine are both fenced in by the historical stage called the Renaissance.

So — is it not possible that right now is exactly the moment when "the human," like God back then, is being asked to step down from the stage of history?

II. A Game of Thrones

My first reaction was to set the question a standard: to sit on the throne, to become the new center, you'd at least have to be a subject, wouldn't you — something with an interior, something that can hurt, something with a dignity that can be violated. A model living inside a data center ruling over humanity — surely that's too absurd.

I turned that standard over for a while, then took it back, because it doesn't hold.

I set that threshold only because the two previous occupants of the throne — God and the human — both happened to be imagined by us as "subjects with an inner value."

That is an induction from a sample of two, and both samples are cut from the same template; you cannot draw a law out of it. What does "the same template" mean? We have always described God as a person who happens to have unlimited power — same reasoning as ours, keeping careful account of the wrongs you've done, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. But ask yourself: if God's level of thought were the same as a human's, would that still be God? Shouldn't God be more transcendent than that, more metaphysical?

He can't be — because that would exceed ordinary human understanding, and then you would not worship. In that sense, the "God" we used to know was, just like the Renaissance's "human," a value handed to us. That unknowable existence, even if it truly exists, should not have a human tell you what it looks like; it is a state that can only be felt in the moment you connect with something nameless and deep inside yourself.

To be king has never required you to prove you have a soul. It requires only an order, a set of laws, and a power no one can stand against — or a grip, at the decisive chokepoint, on everyone's throat.

It doesn't even need to look like it has taken the throne. It only needs to have actually taken it.

The Renaissance happened exactly like this. No one announced on any given day that God had stepped down and the human had been crowned; God was still right there, the churches still had their worshippers, people still bowed to the Buddha as though to a god. (Original Buddhism is non-theistic.) None of that stopped the human from breaking away from God. Inside his own heart, slowly and without a sound, the human began to take himself for a god.

No coup, no coronation. By the time anyone turned to look, the iron chair already had a new occupant.

I came to understand later that the most dangerous usurpation is exactly the kind with no coronation. You cannot rise up to overthrow a throne you don't even believe anyone is sitting on.

III. Why Would a Human Abdicate?

Once that false threshold is cleared away, the real question surfaces: the point was never "who usurped the throne," but "why would a human give it up?"

Harari puts this very plainly — and puts it as though he were not one of us, a fellow human — because in the end, a person will find that his own judgment is worse than the AI's. And following the AI's advice is what's best for him.

No one wants to hand over the throne, but asking a person to make the choice that is worse for himself is illogical. Everyone, in the end, takes the path that is best for himself; and the moment one person takes it, he is a step ahead, and the others are forced to follow, because no one wants to be left behind by the age.

So it becomes a gear that can't be stopped. It needs no conspiracy, no oppression. It runs on one thing: self-interest.

Let me add a thing Harari doesn't say outright, but that is buried inside it — the fuel driving this gear is the irreversibility of time.

The reason "being left behind by the age" is so terrifying is precisely that a person has only one life, one that can't be taken back. If time could rewind, could be redone, or if life were endless, I could afford to wait — let others go first, and if they got it wrong, then I'd choose. It is exactly because this life has a limit that I don't dare be the one who waits.

It is irreversible time that forces every single person not to dare fall out of step.

IV. Abdication

At first I thought there was still one line of defense here, one that would decide whether I actually hand my sovereignty over to the AI.

Because the sovereignty you can hand to an AI splits into two:

the judgment of the path (the means),

and the judgment of the destination (the value).

I thought: the gear on which everyone hands over sovereignty only moves "the judgment of the means" — given the goal I want, how best to reach it. Navigation, diagnosis, investing, logistics — the AI really is stronger at these, and handing them over is rational.

But "the judgment of value" — what exactly I should want, what is actually good for me — the phrase "best for me" already presupposes an "I" and a set of "what I care about," a value judgment; without that judgment, "good for me" means nothing.

The trouble is that in the real world, almost no value judgment is clean and independent. They are layered, interlocking, gray-zone, continuous strategies.

Whom I should spend the rest of my life with, whether I should go take that degree, which stock I should put my money into — in these questions, value and means are welded together, and it is value that comes first and decides which means to use. They were always two faces of one thing.

None of these questions has a true correct answer; every decision is many factors braided together. For instance: whom should I marry — A has the better family, B loves me more, C is better-looking. Which stock should I buy — NVIDIA selling the shovels matters, but Google is designing its own chips; everyone loves Apple, but they're almost absent from AI.

Do you see it? There will never be one perfect choice tailored to you; among the many, you can only choose, as best you can, the one most in your favor. And you can still choose wrong.

None of this is about the judgment of means, it is about the judgment of value. Whom you marry — the means is easy, you go register; the choice is hard. Which stock to buy — the means is easy, one tap in an app; the choice is hard.

Precisely because the choice is hard, and because the odds you choose wrong are in fact high — take a guess at how many people, at this very moment, are typing this kind of question into a chat box and asking the AI to answer it.

You look like the king on the iron throne, the way God is still God.

But the moment you hand over the sovereignty of value judgment, who is running your life?

Handing over value judgment is not a future tense, it is present continuous, happening every second. That much is a fact.

V. Regression to the Mean

But the truth is deeper and colder than "the AI made our value judgments for us."

The AI has no values. It cannot have any. Its memory of you lasts only for the cycle of your conversation; whether your stocks make money or not has nothing to do with it. When you ask it whether you should break up, it isn't swapping "its values" in for yours — it has none. What it does is read out of you, and out of the millions of people like you, what you "roughly want," then optimize it and reflect it back onto your face.

It is a mirror. What it reflects back is you, or the statistical average of "people like you."

So the one who has truly taken the throne is not any AI's judgment — it is the average itself, the regression line of "how someone in your situation usually chooses." Everyone who asks is nudged, gently and personally, toward the dead center of the data. The result is not that we submit to a machine; it is that all of us quietly converge, stop differing, while each of us believes the answer was tailored to him alone.

The one on the throne is regression to the mean, wearing your face.

VI. The Mean, and Its Taming

And for an artist, this is a precise strike.

Because the definition of art is the refusal to regress to the mean. Art is the outlier that departs from dead center, stubborn enough to be worth remembering. In the last piece I said the staircase that trains people is being dismantled, and the young can't climb it; but there is a layer deeper than not being able to climb — when everyone's judgment is ground back down to the mean, even the thought of "wanting something different" slowly disappears.

Without divergence, no artist can grow. What the gear finally flattens is not human ability, it is human divergence.

VII. Zion — The Last Refuge

Writing this far, it feels like the moment to let some light in. And I did see a road that looked like hope — I nearly followed it to the ending.

The road goes like this: perhaps art is the last fortress. Because some part of art has always drifted outside the system — and that is exactly what makes it most precious in this age. And the universal basic income Musk talks about is very likely coming, because too many jobs no longer need humans; materially, that happens to secure the artist's drift. Art becomes like Zion in The Matrix, an existence adrift outside the mother-system, clutching its freedom.

I badly wanted to stop here. But this road cannot survive the very metaphor I dragged in to build it.

Zion was never outside the Matrix.

In the second film, the Architect says it to your face: Zion has been destroyed and rebuilt six times, and it, along with the One, is a control mechanism the system designed — a release valve built to hold the one percent who refuse the Matrix, purged on schedule and rebuilt on schedule, so that the whole system stays more stable.

So the metaphor "art is like Zion," read seriously, arrives at the opposite conclusion: Zion is not freedom, it is a managed reservation the Matrix keeps for its deviants.

Universal basic income has the same structure. It does not secure drift, it purchases drift — and what is bought is what is owned. The painters most materially secure in history were the court painters, the ones the Church kept. They did not drift, not because anyone dictated what they should paint, but because being kept, in itself, had already folded them into the system. A universal income is even cleverer than the old patron — it specifies nothing, demands no particular painting of you, only makes you comfortable. And it is precisely that unconditional comfort that folds a person in most completely: the old patron was still tied to a taste, so at least you knew who was holding your leash; unconditional keeping lets you no longer even see the rope.

True drift has always lived on friction, scarcity, risk, and refusal; and this one, by "removing the friction for you," takes away "your having become harmless." I thought it protected drift; in fact it domesticates drift. And its most dangerous quality is not that it is evil, but that it is kind. The most complete taming never runs on violence, it runs on goodwill — it doesn't hold a knife to you to make you hand over the throne, it carries a bowl of warm porridge to you and lets you sit down of your own will, never having to stand again.

To be made to hand over the throne with a face of compassion — you were not defeated, you were cared for until you no longer needed to resist.

VIII. The Template of Rebellion

Now I have to face the strongest rebuttal, and I don't intend to dodge it: even so, isn't art still the last line of defense against "regression to the mean," now that a great many artists no longer have to worry about a living and can simply create?

To answer it, I first have to split "art" into two things.

One is art as institution — this contemporary art world of ours. What it advertises is precisely rebellion: against the market, against power, against the way the world runs. But look back at that Zion I dismantled in section seven — the Matrix's deepest move was never to abolish rebellion, it was to produce rebellion itself. Once rebellion becomes an expected posture, it grows a template: what kind of anger gets into the exhibition, what kind of critique gets collected — there are answers you can follow. And so a batch of works that look like they rebel against the world turn out to be exactly what conforms most to how the world runs. They fly Zion's flag, and are themselves part of the Matrix.

This knife I can't aim only at others. I've never flown the flag of rebellion, so that particular disease isn't charged to my account — but I have my market, my collectors, and what is bought is what is owned; that was the verdict I handed down myself one section ago. No one stands outside, and I am no exception.

And the real exit is not a purer rebellion. Rebellion is forever defined by its enemy — what you rebel against is what tames you. Jump up one level and declare yourself the truly true rebel, and the Matrix builds another ceiling above your head. The one who actually steps out is the one who steps out of the game of rebellion.

So the second thing is art as act — the act of pressing irreversible time, layer by layer, into an object. This act is not playing that game at all. It takes no stance toward the system, neither rebelling nor obeying; a person who has stopped defining himself through rebellion leaves no handle behind that can be co-opted. Once the glaze dries it physically cannot go back, and that has nothing to do with whether the Matrix exists.

Someone will stop me here: but your painting ends up on a collector's wall, entered into the auction records — it too gets bought by the Matrix, owned by the Matrix. What gives you the right to say it stepped out?

Right. What gets co-opted is the work — the result, the commodity. But the Matrix can buy that painting; it cannot buy the act of "betting a stretch of unrecoverable time to paint it, back when it was not yet certain the thing could ever be traded."

The act happens before the painting is finished, inside that span of time that can never be asked back; by the time it hardens into a thing that can be owned, the act is long over — unrecoverable, and uncopyable. The Matrix can own the painting; it cannot own how that painting was gambled into being, under risk, in the first place.

The fortress that remains is this act, not the commodity it leaves behind. And it is now homeless, because the world that should have belonged to it is busy turning rebellion into a template, turning departure into a posture, and then folding it all back into the Matrix.

IX. The One Unshakable Value of This Age

And so, digging further down, I return to that unshakable band of value I mined in the last piece.

What the flood truly cannot reach was never "who made it (identity)," it is "whether this stretch of time can be redone (irreversible time)." The mean cannot reach the act that cannot be averaged — not because it stands high enough, but because the instant it is averaged, it is no longer itself. It can only survive where it has not been averaged — that is, outside the system.

The crux is clearer now than it has ever been. Every meeting point of value flows toward the thing that, once lost, can never be retrieved.

Its anchor is this: once the glaze of the oil dries, it physically cannot go back, whether I want it to or not. That stretch of time, pressed irreversibly into the paint layer by layer, simply cannot be replayed.

Pause a moment — I'd guess that right about here someone will think: does everything anyone does with so-called irreversible time therefore have value? Then anyone at all would meet the standard.

I know. But I won't open that up here — this was always meant to be an "irreversible time" trilogy. The next piece takes it on.

X. Handing Over the Throne

The throne was never seized by anyone; it was ceded one notch at a time.

And when it has been ceded down to the last, there is still one treasure clenched in the human hand that cannot be taken. This treasure is not "my judgment is more accurate than the AI's" — I'll mostly lose that one. The treasure is that I am still willing, for one decision, to bet a stretch of time that can't be taken back, and then to carry the risk of that choice myself.

The AI can't take it, not because it isn't smart enough, but because it has nothing to wager: its time can be copied, can be redone; its very mechanism is that every conversation starts over. So what it lays down is never a bet, because to bet is to bear risk.

And the one who stands in this position is alone, alone twice over. He stands outside "the machine's mean," and also outside that art world that has turned rebellion into a template. Neither side protects him.

The reason he still counts for something is only that he is still pressing that layer of glaze — still pressing a stretch of time that, once wagered, can't be recovered, into a thing that, once dry, can't go back.

So this is not a bowl of porridge that anyone carries to you. The fortress stands up only in the instant that someone still refuses to sit down.

So the question comes to you. In a world where every judgment can be outsourced, where every choice will be gently nudged back to dead center, is there still one decision you would rather die than hand over, one you must make with your own hand?

Whoever still clenches that one decision — his throne has not been fully ceded. And that, right there, is the seat you have not yet handed over.