{"id":473685,"date":"2026-02-11T21:46:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T21:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/473685\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T21:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T21:46:19","slug":"the-singularity-wont-be-gentle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/473685\/","title":{"rendered":"The singularity won’t be gentle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sam Altman and Elon Musk at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in 2015. Getty Images.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a recurring problem on the Silver Bulletin editorial calendar: I always have AI posts planned for some point in the near future, but rarely manage to publish them. There\u2019s always a politics or sports thing that seems like a lighter lift.<\/p>\n

We did publish what I thought were two good stories on AI last year: one in January entitled \u201cIt\u2019s time to come to grips with AI<\/a>\u201d and another in May: \u201cChatGPT is shockingly bad at poker<\/a>\u201d. These were fair reflections on my mood regarding AI at the time, and I think both stories hold up well. But we haven\u2019t written much on AI since then, even though it continues to occupy a large fraction of my mental bandwidth. There\u2019s a tendency for everything that gets written about AI to fashion itself as being \u201cepic\u201d, but perhaps that\u2019s exactly the wrong mindset given how rapidly the landscape is changing, and incrementalism is better. So I hope you\u2019ll excuse this unplanned and slightly stream-of-consciousness take.<\/p>\n

Recently, the trend in the circles I follow has been toward extreme bullishness on AI, particularly in its impact on programming and the possibility of recursive self-improvement (i.e., where AI models continually create better versions of themselves). This reflects a reversal from a stretch in late 2025 when progress seemed a little slower than smart people had been expecting<\/a>. Admittedly, what constitutes \u201cbullish\u201d or \u201cbearish\u201d depends on whether you think more rapid progress in AI would be good for civilization or bad (even catastrophic<\/a>). It\u2019s also not clear the extent to which these changes in the mood reflect \u201cvibe shifts\u201d as opposed to actual developments on the ground. If you look at AI-related prediction markets<\/a> \u2014 or for that matter, more traditional markets<\/a> \u2014 they\u2019ve gyrated around, but probably not as quickly as sentiment about AI has on Twitter or Substack has.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So here\u2019s a take I consider relatively straightforward, but I don\u2019t think has really sunk into the conventional wisdom. If AI has even a fraction of the impact that many people in Silicon Valley now expect<\/a> on the fabric of work and daily life, it\u2019s going to have profound and unpredictable political impacts.<\/p>\n

Last June, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, published a blog post entitled \u201cThe Gentle Singularity<\/a>\u201d. If you\u2019re not familiar with the jargon, the Singularity<\/a> (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) is a hypothesized extremely rapid takeoff in technological progress \u2014 so technologies that would once have taken years or decades to come to fruition might be realized in months, days, hours, minutes, microseconds. I\u2019m not sure that I want to weigh in right now on my \u201cpriors\u201d about the Singularity. It\u2019s probably safe to say they\u2019re more skeptical than your average Berkeley-based machine-learning researcher but more credulous than your typical political takes artist.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m more confident in asserting is that the notion of a gentle singularity is bullshit. When Altman writes something like this, I don\u2019t buy it:<\/p>\n

If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example). Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we\u2019ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other. People have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don\u2019t care very much about machines.<\/p>\n

Although I doubt that AI per se is having a large impact on these measures right now, you\u2019ve probably noticed that the broader public isn\u2019t exactly in an optimistic mood. Certainly not in the United States, although we\u2019re not unique in that regard<\/a>. Gallup polling<\/a> released this week found that optimism about future life satisfaction has plummeted. A lot of that is due to \u201cpolitics\u201d: the decline has been concentrated among Democrats since Trump was reelected, a sentiment that I empathize with but I don\u2019t think is entirely justified<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Still, the belief that technological progress, warts and all, would be broadly beneficial for society, has come under some deserved scrutiny lately. In other Gallup polling<\/a>, the percentage of people who have \u201ca great deal\u201d or a \u201clarge amount\u201d of trust in \u201clarge technology companies\u201d fell from 32 percent to 24 percent between 2020 (the first time Gallup posed this question) and last year.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit to having my own anxieties about AI. Despite what you might assume, I probably rate lower than average on broader anxiety\/neuroticism (especially<\/a> as compared to other liberals<\/a>). Even if AI \u201cdisrupts\u201d jobs like mine, I\u2019m probably in the upper percentiles of the population in my capacity to weather any such storms or plausibly to benefit from them. I do wonder, though, how I\u2019d feel if I were a decade or two younger \u2014 or if I had children. (Perhaps, if AI progress is very rapid, I\u2019ll go into a slightly-earlier-than-planned retirement and bide my time playing poker.) I was recently speaking with the mom of an analytically-minded, gifted-and-talented student. In a world where her son\u2019s employment prospects are highly questionable because of AI, even if he overachieves 99 percent of his class in a way that would once have all but guaranteed having a chance to live the American Dream, you had better believe that will have a profound political impact.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

Let me add a few additional points on why I think the political impact of AI is probably understated:<\/p>\n

\u201cSilicon Valley\u201d is bad at politics. If nothing else during Trump 2.0, I think we\u2019ve learned that Silicon Valley doesn\u2019t exactly have its finger on the pulse of the American public<\/a>. It\u2019s insular, it\u2019s very, very, very, very rich \u2014 Elon Musk is now nearly a trillionaire!<\/a> \u2014 and it plausibly stands to benefit from changes that would be undesirable to a large and relatively bipartisan<\/a> fraction of the public. I expect it to play its hand in a way that any rich \u201cdegen<\/a>\u201d on a poker winning streak would: overconfidently and badly.<\/p>\n

Cluelessness on the left about AI means the political blowback will be greater once it realizes the impact. My post<\/a> last January was partly a critique of the political left. We have some extremely rich guys like Altman who claim that their technology will profoundly reshape society in ways that nobody was necessarily asking for. And also, conveniently enough, make them profoundly richer and more powerful! There probably ought to be a <\/a>lot<\/a> of intrinsic skepticism<\/a> about this. But instead, the mood on the left tends toward dismissing large language models as hallucination-prone \u201cchatbots\u201d. I expect this to change at some point. And as Anthropic\u2019s Jack Clark<\/a> pointed out when I spoke with him for my book<\/a>, this degree of profound technological change often produces literal revolutions:<\/p>\n

So when Silicon Valley leaders speak of a world radically remade by AI, I wonder whose world they\u2019re talking about. Something doesn\u2019t quite add up in this equation. Jack Clark has put it more vividly: \u201cPeople don\u2019t take guillotines seriously. But historically, when a tiny group gains a huge amount of power and makes life-altering decisions for a vast number of people, the minority gets actually, for real, killed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Disruption to the \u201ccreative classes\u201d could produce an outsized political impact. I\u2019m not exactly sure where people in the creative classes \u2014 say, writers or editors or artists or, to broaden the net, industries like consulting or advertising \u2014 rank in terms of the medium-term threat from AI-related job displacement. (Journalists per se have long lived with an anvil over their heads in a perpetually struggling industry<\/a>.) These are the people I tend to hang out with. In our darker moods, we sometimes have conversations about who will or won\u2019t have a job in five years. I suspect they\u2019re at above-average risk, though \u2014 less threatened than, say, mediocre programmers but more than, say, someone with irreplaceable physical gifts like Victor Wembanyama<\/a>. However cynical one is about the failings of the \u201cexpert\u201d class<\/a>, these are people who tend to shape public opinion and devote a lot of time and energy to politics. If a consensus develops among this cohort that their livelihoods are threatened, or that their children\u2019s livelihoods are, I expect there will be enough political blowback that anti-elite pushback won\u2019t be enough to overcome it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Altman and Elon Musk at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in 2015. Getty Images. There\u2019s a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-473685","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}