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The Foothills of the Singularity: Uphill from the Slough of Despond?*

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*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.

Downhill From the Anthropocene*

William Timberman7 Comments

*From a line in Jackson Browne’s song Downhill From Everywhere. The muse is as strong as ever in him.

A year and five months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, is there anyone left in the United States who hasn’t at least begun to realize just how quickly even the most stable-seeming institutions can implode, how we can wake up one morning in a world where it takes a wheelbarrowload, a truckload of familiar certainties to trade for a dozen eggs or a gallon of gasoline?

Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. We’re still on the brink of all sorts of revelations that have yet to reach the cretinous in their red hats, or the earnest in their fantasies of how all this could have been avoided if only Joe Biden had been just a little less sleepy, or Kamala Harris had been just a little more astute. The exceptions of American Exceptionalism are, it should now be clear to all but the most persistently deluded, as vulnerable to entropic processes as the divinity of the Pharoahs, the steadfastness of Roman virtus, or the persistence of sunlight on the British Empire.

Caveat Emptor in the Age of Generative AI

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AI-generated media presentations will soon be able to approximate reality well enough to be accepted as reality by all but the most sceptical of us. What do we do when we can no longer trust our own eyes and ears to distinguish between media representations of real objects and events and those which have been fabricated by generative AI prompts?

I say we proceed cautiously, at least until we see how these new threats to our credulity are likely to play out. AI hasn’t yet made us as stupid as Sam Altman, Mark Andreesen, Peter Thiel or Elon Muck Musk would like us to be, so we might as well act like it. If something seems fishy, we shouldn’t accept it at face value, not without checking other sources. If someone wants us to believe in Jesus, UFOs, or Donald Trump’s sincerity, that’s their business. Whether or not it’s our business is up to us. We know the drill: Follow the money. Cui bono? What’s in it for me, for us? Who do you work for? We’re going to have to be masters of scepticism if we want to successfully navigate our way through the coming avalanche of AI-generated fakery.

How is this different from the various cons and manias of the past, from the Shroud of Turin to the Mercury Theater’s alien invasion? The difference is scale—everything, everywhere, all at once—and immersion. If we can’t look away, we’ll have no time to form our own judgments about what’s to be accepted as real and what is not—socially, economically, politically, we’ll be prime candidates for victimization.

In the end, what it comes down to is looking for ways to live which don’t require us to need or want anything offered to us by people we’ve learned, often at great personal cost, not to trust. Simply asking to be left alone is no longer an option.

Random Thoughts on Our New World Disorder

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The geopolitics of the twenty-first century are showing increasing signs of the raggedness that history suggests can persist for a very long time between one period of stability and another. People claiming to predict the future in such times tend to be either Pollyannas or doomsayers, and while their predictions may make headlines for a while, over time they tend to become background noise, the static that always accompanies the tearing apart of certainties. If wisdom is still possible for anyone living in times like ours, it will inevitably be forced to alternate between irony and silence.

That unfortunately won’t prevent anyone with a smartphone these days, including me, from having opinions. Without pretending to look to some chimerical crowd-sourced consensus to save us, what do we think we know about our present? What do we, what can we expect from our future?

What of the threat of global warming, and the hope of success from proposed technology-based responses to it? The technology to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels already exists, and China has demonstrated what can be achieved with a concerted effort to deploy advances in both photovoltaic and wind technology at scale. Europe, chastened by Putin’s depravities, is already relying on these technologies to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Even an official U.S. policy of climate change denialism is unlikely to persist much beyond Donald Trump’s time in office.

What hasn’t been adequately addressed by the increased economic competitiveness of renewable energy sources, however, is the colossal release of methane from the melting of the permafrost in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, nor the possibility that a steady increase in human energy generation and consumption, even from renewable sources, is unsustainable. Whether CO2 in the atmosphere can be reduced or not, turning the earth into a perpetually glowing ball on a schedule which defeats the capability of natural biological selection to compensate for its effect on non-human species seems like a recipe for disaster in the long run, even if Bill McKibben’s exhortations in the present do eventually bear fruit.

Then there’s the pressure of a steadily increasing population on the production and equitable distribution of global food supplies. We’re already seeing one critical consequence in the collapse of subsistence agriculture in the Global South. This is clearly a significant contributor to the northward mass migrations that have already caused measurable increases in political instability in both Europe and the U.S.

The industrialization of agriculture, once looked upon as a blessing, a way out of our Malthusian dilemma, is now coming to seem more like a curse. The evidence in recent years of the cascade failures that can arise from the intensity of our land use and the increasing deployment of inadequately researched technologies, including biotechnologies, in support of it, is a clear warning that these practices may be unsustainable. The damage caused by fertilizer runoff—ecological imbalances, groundwater contamination, localized species extinctions, etc.—is real. So also are the profit-based preference for crop monocultures, the intensive use of environmentally questionable pesticides and herbicides, and the deployment of genetically engineered crops that can spread uncontrollably through cross-fertilization outside the boundaries of the fields they’ve been planted in. The mass die-off of pollinating insects, already well-advanced, may be irreversible, and no one yet seems to fully understand what is causing it.

And what of war, specifically of nuclear war? With the Pax Americana now brought to an abrupt and inescapable end under Donald Trump, unilateral abandonments of global trade treaties and agreements have become commonplace. The retreat to xenophobia and hard-core racial and religious bigotries in the so-called liberal democracies is now abundantly clear to anyone who’s been paying attention. The fanatical navel-gazing of fascist ideologues is on the rise everywhere we dare to look.

These are all malignancies that have their origins in fear, and derive their motive power from it as well. Once that fear becomes endemic in a society, it fosters an infatuation with and ultimately a legitimization of violence that embeds itself in every aspect of social and political interaction up to and including routine government policy choices.

Anyone familiar with the history of twentieth century conflicts and the impact of digital technology on all aspects of human interaction, is forced to confront the possibility that wars from now on will not only be cyclical, but global, and that wars conducted with the present level of military technology can lead to the falsely rational conclusion among our political leaders that genocide, symbolic or actual, is the only policy response that can adequately address the magnitude of their uncertainties. Do we really imagine that facing what they believe to be an existential threat, the leaders of our present and future nuclear powers will voluntarily reliquish the use of weapons they’ve now had at their disposal for nearly a century?

Where will we be ten years, fifty years, a hundred years from now? Will we still be here at all? That’s the real question. As far as I can tell, there doesn’t presently seem to be a comprehensive and credible answer to that question. If there’s ever to be an answer at all, it’s very unlikely to be a single answer. It’s much more likely to consist of a lot of little answers, a collectivity of answers cobbled together by all sorts of people, not all of them of good will, all over the world.

If we succeed in overcoming our present uncertainties, and the fear they engender, without resorting to butchering one another on a grand scale once again, perhaps on a scale we can’t recover from at all, I have no idea what form that success will take. What I am certain of, however, is that no present ism or ology will prove to be of as much help as many of us think. We’ll need to be both more flexible than we are today, and more tolerant, we’ll need to invent not only new technologies, but new selves. If we can manage that, then maybe our failures to this point will one day come to be understood as steps along a road that finally led somewhere more promising than the edge of a cliff.

The Ingress and Egress of It All

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I’m watching NASA’s preparations for the April Fool’s Day launch of Artemis II, their first crewed circumlunar mission since Apollo 8 in 1968. My twenty-five year-old self watches with me, that long-haired, incurably hopeful New Leftist I used to be jammed into a neighbor’s living room with my then girlfriend and most of the rest of our ambivalent crew, waiting for Walter Cronkite to light up my neighbor’s 13 inch Sony TV with the confirmation that Neil Armstrong had become the first human being in history to set foot on another celestial body.

NASA representatives still talk like automatons, still use unnecessarily cryptic words/phrases like ingress and egress, capcom (capsule communicator), extravehicular activity, translunar injection. It’s all so cult-like, so pious, so oblivious to the atrocities being commited in our name elsewhere on our own celestial body, that blue marble of aspiration, the one we keep betraying. The word then was Vietnam, the word today is Iran. But never mind. For now we are watching a special civilian operation. The special military operation will have to wait until tomorrow.

Star Trek for Adults

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This week I’ve begun re-reading Iain M. Banks’s Culture series of science fiction novels, and am even more impressed by the subversive humor in them than I was the first time around. Purely as science fiction they’re genuinely entertaining, although what passes for science in them is science only if you can actually bring yourself to believe that the pursuit of it will someday free us from the barbarisms of need that always seem to short-circuit our progress as sentient beings.

Banks’s plotting is intricate and satisfying enough, the dilemmas faced by his characters and their responses to them plausible enough, but what I treasure most about his storytelling is the sheer maturity of the civilization he imagines. Intentionally or not, the chronicles of his future galaxy hold up a devastatingly unflattering mirror to the ruling class dumbshows of our present century. Comparing Banks’s protagonists to the morally and intellectually truncated inhabitant of today’s White House, and the belligerent idiocy of his MAGA legions, I somehow find it as easy to laugh as to cry, a state of ambiguous bliss that’s not on offer in many other places, real or virtual, in these new dark ages of ours.

Now and again the economist Brad DeLong calls us as we are these days East African Plains Apes, and has referred in interviews to the millennial imaginings of post New Deal liberalism as Star Trek Socialism. I suppose both are true enough, but I think I’d be tempted to shave my head and take up a begging bowl if what’s implied by these witticisms were all we had to look forward to as a species. Ape that I am, Star Trek Socialism and its implacable pieties in particular would bore me to death, leave me grimacing and staring at my shoes, praying for the bullshit please, please to be over in time for a drink before dinner. Running a bar in some back alley tucked away in an insignificant corner of a General Systems Vehicle (GSV), on the other hand, would be a delight, especially if the shipmind would pipe a little Mozart in as I was busy squeezing limes for the evening’s margaritas.

Signs of the Apocalypse

William Timberman

Oligarchs, edgelords, influencers. The manosphere. Algorithms, blockchains, chatbot haruspications. Data centers, concentration camps, genocide. Stephen Miller in sunglasses and a shiny suit. The crooked cross at the base of Pam Bondi’s throat. The gig economy, the attention economy, the awake all night calliope of dread.

Does the Pope approve of Samuel Alito? Has Harvard made its deal with our new devils yet? Will someone please show me the way to the next whisky bar?

But never mind. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Deus vult.

If Not Now, When?

William Timberman

“Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I said, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”