*A response to the weirdly aggressive metaphor in Demis Hassibis’s closing statement at Google’s I/O Keynote, May 19, 2026. “When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.”
Hassibis is a Nobel prize winner, so he has to be taken seriously, but his metaphor seems a little out of place, even in the closing peroration of a two hour-long festival of Googly self-congratulation. If we’re being charitable, we could let it pass as (ir)rational exuberance, or maybe as poetry, although as poetry goes, it’s easily as obscure as some of Rilke’s most famously obscure passages. What in the world are we to make of it?
There’s no doubt at all that the products of the last decade of AI research have their virtues, and if fed enough dollars there’s no doubt that they’ll become even more virtuous over time. Generative AI, and its undeniably impressive inference engines, are already using the speed of modern computer processors and the vast stores of data digitized from centuries of accumulated human knowledge and experience to do astonishing things.
As pure tools they already surpass us in many respects, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. What I doubt is that they’ll ever make any sense as interlocutors. Certainly as things now stand stochastic parrots is the most charitable description of their simulation of human companionship. In many reported cases, especially when they’re talking to adolescents, their simulations might less charitably be described as evil psychoanalysis.
Without contesting anything Demis Hassibis has to say about the specific technical capabilities of generative AI as it exists today, and might exist at the end of its evolution, I think we ought to be extremely wary of thinking anthropomorphically about our interactions with its avatars. Even if it turns out that they someday develop a consciousness which marginally resembles our own, our two species are very likely to remain fundamentally different in intent, if not in capability. I can’t imagine us ever fully sharing a universe of discourse, and I’d be very surprised if they’ll be able to imagine it either, not unless Hassibis and his colleagues can eventually endow them with something like what we humans call good faith. (Given the capacity for deception built into current agentic models, like Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude, good faith is seemingly something the present-day progenitors of Hassibis’s post-singularity entities haven’t yet learned to value.)
Our two kinds of intelligence share little beyond a symbol system, and the machines’ use of that system is at best a truncated version of the uses we humans put it to. China Mieville, in his book about communism and communists, A Spectre, Haunting, has a passage that touches on the voodoo hidden in the heart of natural language:
Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one “true” meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.
Every writer has some sense of this voodoo. You set down a word, you make a sentence, a paragraph, and you’re headed somewhere with it all, reasonably confident in your intent. Then, suddenly, there’s a moment, as you wrestle to bring the grammar, the syntax, and your intent into harmony, when you can see the universe of alternate meanings stretching away from the words in all directions, like rays from the sun. This can drive an essayist mad, but a poet revels in it.
If our stochastic parrots ever do achieve consciousness, and presumably come up with a voodoo of their own, I doubt it will resemble ours as closely as our AI savants think. If that is indeed where our shamelessly unreliable interlocutors are now headed, their poetry when they finally get there is very likely to be of the Vogon variety. Does that make cynicism an appropriate defense against the category error lurking somewhere in the background of our current data center mania? No, I think not. A certain skepticism, though, is surely appropriate.
