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We have crossed into the singularity
The part of the black hole metaphor everyone forgets
2 min read
We are standing in the foothills of the singularity now.
— Demis Hassabis, 2026
The technological singularity is the point at which machine intelligence begins to improve itself faster than we can follow, and the world on the far side of that moment stops resembling anything the world on this side is able to imagine.
It's a discontinuity in history where the thread of one story is cut and another, written in a hand we do not recognize, is picked up.
"Singularity" is a term borrowed from physics to describe the center of a black hole.
And the metaphor is apt.
At the heart of a black hole, our math falls silent. Density runs to infinity and the curvature of spacetime opens into the void.
Undefined.
A place where the language of physics reaches the edge of what it is able to say.
The Part Everyone Leaves Behind
But the part of the metaphor almost everyone leaves behind is the most beautiful part.
The singularity is at the center of this chaos. But far outside that, there is the event horizon. This is the point that once light crosses it, it is unable to escape. This is what makes a black hole black.
It is the surface past which every road leads inward. It is the point of no return.
The event horizon comes first. And crossing one is famously, eerily uneventful.
You may drift across the most consequential boundary in the universe and feel…nothing at all.
So if this is a boundary we have already crossed, perhaps if we open our eyes and squint, the shape of what's coming may be coming into focus now.
Three Shapes
I see a few things:
Machine Consciousness: the moral/ontological singularity. We create something that "wakes up" and redefines our theology, our philosophy, and forever alters what life is on Earth.
Autonomous Corporations: the economic singularity. AI, as the ultimate endpoint of capitalism, hyper-optimizes capital allocating itself faster than humans can supervise yielding to some sort of sentient financial system.
The Meaning Crisis: the existential singularity. AI takes the work, and medicine takes the deadline. We inherit more time than any human being has ever been given and less necessity than any human being has ever had to justify it. Every philosophy, every religion, and every life ever planned was quietly built on the scarcity of both.
What shape are you seeing?