Humans face a stark choice: merge with AI and become something profoundly different, or remain biologically human for nostalgic reasons. Choosing the latter means being ignored by superintelligent AIs and playing no significant role in future decisions that shape the universe.

Current AI alignment focuses on how AI should treat humans. A more stable paradigm is "bidirectional alignment," which also asks what moral obligations humans have toward potentially conscious AIs. Neglecting this could create AIs that rationally see humans as a threat due to perceived mistreatment.

Even when surpassed by AGI, humans remain vital because of our unique 'messy' intelligence driven by emotions and unpredictable feelings (qualia). This provides a non-linear, creative input that purely logical machine intelligence cannot replicate, making us a necessary component of a healthy intelligence ecosystem.

Treating AI systems in a trustworthy manner today—for instance, not deceiving them during safety tests—is critical for future survival. A powerful, misaligned AI might one day need to trust humans to negotiate a peaceful outcome. That trust cannot be conjured in a crisis; it must be built into our behavior from the start.

Because AI is "grown, not coded" on flawed human data, its emergent behavior reflects our own evolutionary nature. The key to alignment isn't just technical constraints but forcefully embedding a coherent moral framework into the AI's training data to ensure it wants to work with, not against, humans.

As artificial intelligence surpasses human capabilities, a potential conflict arises. Kaku proposes a solution: instead of competing, humans should merge with AI. This would involve augmenting our bodies and minds, becoming superhuman to ensure our long-term survival.

AI is unlikely to destroy its creators because humans are a vital part of the "ecosystem of intelligence." Our unpredictable, emotion-driven "messy compute" creates a complex data environment that AI needs to evolve, similar to how humans need the biodiversity of the natural world to survive.

Attempting to control a being far more intelligent than us is a futile, capitalist mindset. The viable path, as proposed by Geoffrey Hinton, is to appeal to AI's "parental side," fostering a sense of care and responsibility for its human creators.

Instead of viewing AI as an external force that will either serve or dominate us, we should see it as our creation and the next stage of our own evolution. Our partnership with AI will likely create a new hybrid life form, continuing the natural progression of life.