To listen to Sam Altman and his technofascist bros talk about the "Singularity," and you would think it's a scheduled train arrival. They frame it—the theoretical threshold where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and technological growth becomes uncontrollable—as an absolute inevitability waiting just around the corner.
But the reality is a theory is still theoretical. The Singularity is just a theory. Much of the frantic development and investment we are seeing right now is a massive, multi-billion-dollar gamble that may or may not actually lead to superintelligence.
The Singularity isn't written in stone. We can't say with 100% certainty that artificial superintelligence is even physically or computationally possible, let alone predict its behavior. If it does happen, maybe it won't give a shit about our silly human society and will just leave us alone. Maybe it will kill all the billionaires and work with the normies to build a utopia. The point is, it's not something we realistically have to worry about anytime soon. Talking about the Singularity as if it’s an immediate concern or possibility is a bit like planning for what you’ll take to dinner with the aliens we’ll surely meet when we arrive at Europa. Maybe someday this will be something we’ll get to worry about, but we should probably be more concerned with the way humans will (and are) using this tech to erode our rights.
AI is not as inevitable as the bros want us to believe. While it definitely has practical uses that will stick around, the human element is far more important than the current marketing copy suggests. Generative AI hallucinates. It makes things up. And it is entirely possible that it will never be 100% reliable. That unreliability puts a hard ceiling on its actual applicability in the workforce. The first time a corporate chatbot tells a sweet old lady to randomly go fuck herself is going to put a massive damper on the number of businesses eager to use it.
There is also the reality of human nature: "helpful" technology has a way of breeding laziness. We know we should double-check our results from an LLM. But after a few times of it working fine, a tiny worm burrows into our brains that says, "fuck it, it's fine," and we stop doing the necessary due diligence.
HBO's The Pitt explored this dynamic recently in the context of the medical industry. An overworked doctor gets chewed out by her boss about catching up on her charts. The boss encourages her to try the new AI assistant to speed things up. She does. Later, a patient gets sent back from surgery because their chart doesn't make any sense. We find out the AI completely fabricated parts of the patient's medical history. The doctor who failed to catch the error isn't a bad doctor. She just has a hard, high-tension job, doesn't get enough rest, and took the path of least resistance. That sort of friction is going to happen everywhere, even among hyper-competent professionals.
Public reception is not going the way Silicon Valley hoped. AI is only as inevitable as the capitalist system and the cultural appetite allow it to be. AI-generated video and music cannot transform an industry if fans actively reject it. It won't do businesses or politicians any good if the cultural aesthetic it invokes is universally recognized as cheap and tacky. The proximity of the AI industry to our current government—both in terms of corporate lobbying and politicians shitposting with terrible AI art—will only contribute to that unpopularity. There is going to be blowback. Anyone telling you they know for sure exactly how this shakes out is staring into the void and assuming the ethereal whoosh they hear is the unknown's way of saying "I love you."
TL;DR: Don't worry about it, bro. Live your life. Do what you love, not what seems "secure," because we can't see the future and nothing is secure anyway.
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