alt Hacker NewsThe Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
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Once men turned their thinking over to machines
in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines
to enslave them.
...
Thou shalt not make a machine in the
likeness of a human mind.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?
You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.
Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.
Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit."
– 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance.
Damn, good read.
Great article, super fun.
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.
You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
Many have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong.
He also argued that computing power would continue growing exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often interpreted as around 2030–2040. He estimated that once computers achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on the order of 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per second), they could match and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.
> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.
I’m going to lose it the day this becomes vernacular.
I was at an alternative type computer unconference and someone has organised a talk about the singularity, it was in a secondary school classroom and as evening fell in a room full of geeks no one could figure out how to turn on the lights .... we concluded that the singularity probably wasn't going to happen
The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation
dx 2
-- = x
dt
1
x = -----
C-t
dx
-- = x
dt
Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation
dx
-- = (1-x) x
dt
I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English.
It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into.
Can confirm.
> arXiv "emergent" (the count of AI papers about emergence) has a clear, unambiguous R² maximum. The other four are monotonically better fit by a line
The only metric going infinite is the one that measures hype
If i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head will explode. That phrase is the real singularity
Phew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp roll over after all.
Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop.
Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature.
Classic LLM lingo in the end there.
It reminds me of that cartoon where a man in a torn suit tells two children sitting by a small fire in the ruins of a city: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."
I'm not sure about current LLM techniques leading us there.
Current LLM-style systems seem like extremely powerful interpolation/search over human knowledge, but not engines of fundamentally new ideas, and it’s unclear how that turns into superintelligence.
As we get closer to a perfect reproduction of everything we know, the graph so far continues to curve upward. Image models are able to produce incredible images, but if you ask one to produce something in an entirely new art style (think e.g. cubism), none of them can. You just get a random existing style. There have been a few original ideas - the QR code art comes to mind[1] - but the idea in those cases comes from the human side.
LLMs are getting extremely good at writing code, but the situation is similar. AI gives us a very good search over humanity's prior work on programming, tailored to any project. We benefit from this a lot considering that we were previously constantly reinventing the wheel. But the LLM of today will never spontaneously realise there there is an undiscovered, even better way to solve a problem. It always falls back on prior best practice.
Unsolved math problems have started to be solved, but as far as I'm aware, always using existing techniques. And so on.
Even as a non-genius human I could come up with a new art style, or have a few novel ideas in solving programming problems. LLMs don't seem capable of that (yet?), but we're expecting them to eventually have their own ideas beyond our capability.
Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species (or another superintelligent AI) and then it would act like them. But how do we synthesise superintelligent training data? And even then, would they be limited to what that superintelligence already knew at the time of training?
Maybe a new paradigm will emerge. Or maybe things will actually slow down in a way - will we start to rely on AI so much that most people don't learn enough for themselves that they can make new novel discoveries?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...
iirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating, let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote, and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time unseeing what they already know
"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance.
I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.
* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)
The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?
If an LLM can figure out how to scale its way through quadratic growth, I'll start giving the singularity propsal more than a candid dismissal.
I wonder if using LLMs for coding can trigger AI psychosis the way it can when using an LLM as a substitute for a relationship. I bet many people here have pretty strong feelings about code. It would explain some of the truly bizarre behaviors that pop up from time to time in articles and comments here.
> I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently
^ That's your problem right there.
Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct.
The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it so. Unfortunately.
>That's a very different singularity than the one people argue about.
---
I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity
>Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict.
It was a key point that society would break, but the exact implementation details of that breakage were left up to the reader.
Are people in San Francisco that stupid that they're having open-clawd meetups and talking about the Singularity non stop? Has San Francisco become just a cliche larp?
Why is finiteness emphasized for polynomial growth, while infinity is emphasized for exponential growth??? I don't think your AI-generated content is reliable, to say the least.
I have lived in San Francisco for more than a decade. I have an active social life and a lot of friends. Literally no one I have ever talked to at any party or event has ever talked about the Singularity except as a joke.
"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" is probably one of the greatest quotes I've heard in 2026.
I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this quote...
Just wanted to leave a note here that the Singularity is inevitable on this timeline (we've already passed the event horizon) so the only thing that can stop it now is to jump timelines.
In other words, there may be a geopolitical crisis in the works, similar to how the Dot Bomb, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, etc popped the Internet Bubble and shifted investment funds towards endless war, McMansions and SUVs to appease the illuminati. Someone might sabotage the birth of AGI like the religious zealot in Contact. Global climate change might drain public and private coffers as coastal areas become uninhabitable, coinciding with the death of the last coral reefs and collapse of fisheries, leading to a mass exodus and WWIII. We just don't know.
My feeling is that the future plays out differently than any prediction, so something will happen that negates the concept of the Singularity. Maybe we'll merge with AGI and time will no longer exist (oops that's the definition). Maybe we'll meet aliens (same thing). Or maybe the k-shaped economy will lead to most people surviving as rebels while empire metastasizes, so we take droids for granted but live a subsistence feudal lifestyle. That anticlimactic conclusion is probably the safest bet, given what we know of history and trying to extrapolate from this point along the journey.
Was this ironically written by AI?
> The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.
> MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.
"I could never get the hang of Tuesdays"
- Arthur Dent, H2G2
Well... I can't argue with facts. Especially not when they're in graph form.
> If things are accelerating (and they measurably are) the interesting question isn't whether. It's when.
I can't decide if a singularitist AI fanatic who doesn't get sigmoids is ironic or stereotypical.
Good post. I guess the transistor has been in play for not even one century, and in any case singularities are everywhere, so who cares? The topic is grandiose and fun to speculate about, but many of the real issues relate to banal media culture and demographic health.
Great read but damn those are some questionable curve fittings on some very scattered data points
I don’t feel like reading what is probably AI generated content. But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points fitting a line, fitting an exponential curve to a set of data measured in %, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say this is not a very good prediction methodology.
Sure is a lot of words though :)
Everyone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece, that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does, its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really fucking weird really quickly).
The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity.
Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!).
We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.
The meme at the top is absolute gold considering the point of the article. 10/10
> The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth
The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It simply will not happen, as defined above.
1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence, used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what? They both live very different lives, and are good at different things.
2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.) just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that control their own environment and will shut down things they don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade, unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or economic arguments otherwise.
3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis, or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses, bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like them.
Is there a term for the tech spaghettification that happens when people closer to the origin of these advances (likely in terms of access/adoption) start to break away from the culture at large because they are living in a qualitatively different world than the unwashed masses? Where the little sparkles of insanity we can observe from a distance today are less induced psychosis and actually represent their lived reality?
The Singularity as a cultural phenomenon (rather than some future event that may or may not happen or even be possible) is proof that Weber didn't know what he was talking about. Modern (and post-modern) society isn't disenchanted, the window dressing has just changed
A fantastic read, even if it makes a lot of silly assumptions - this is ok because it’s self aware of it.
Who knows what the future will bring. If we can’t make the hardware we won’t make much progress, and who knows what’s going to happen to that market, just as an example.
Crazy times we live in.
The Roman Empire took 400 years to collapse, but in San Francisco they know the singularity will occur on (next) Tuesday.
The answer to the meaning of life is 42, by the way :)
This is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the trends described continue, the world will become a much worse place in a few years time.
I hope in the afternoon, the plumber is coming in the morning between 7 and 12, and it’s really difficult to pin those guys to a date
Wow what a fun read
The thing that stands out on that animated graph is that the generated code far outpaces the other metrics. In the current agent driven development hypepocalypse that seems about right - but I would expect it to lag rather than lead.
*edit* - seems inline with what the author is saying :)
> The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.
This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.
And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly.
It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.