Astral Codex Ten

Singularity

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Singularity

Article

Singularity is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between August 01, 2022 and January 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “before 2040 or the Singularity”; “In the mind of an addict, a meth pipe could essentially play the role of a Singularity”; “it gets too close to the original idea of the Singularity”. It most often appears alongside China, Elon Musk, OpenAI.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: August 01, 2022
  • Last seen: January 02, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

22
August 01, 2022 · Original source
Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%
Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward
September 30, 2022 · Original source
Essentially, subjective reward warps the motor-planning space around the thing you believed to have caused the reward. And in general, craving is implemented with tense and warped patterns that restrict movement in directions that don't bring you reward. Extreme addiction might be like being bound in all directions except the one taking you to your addiction. In the mind of an addict, a meth pipe could essentially play the role of a Singularity: under its grip, it becomes the geometric culmination of history as it captures all of your future trajectories.That's one good reason to wait until you're close to death before trying out serious doses of dopaminergics (cf. In Search of the Big Bang).
Inline links: tense and warped patterns, In Search of the Big Bang
Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
(source: SMBC) How seriously should we take these comics? The worse chatbots are (compared to humans) as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the less we have to worry about. But the better chatbots are as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the more upside there could be. I don’t want to speculate on exactly how this would work: it gets too close to the original idea of the Singularity in the sense of “a point where crazy things are happening so fast it’s not worth trying to predict”. Conclusion And Predictions I’m nervous writing this, because I remember the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when we all assumed the Internet would be a force for reason and enlightenment. Surely if everyone were just allowed to debate everyone else, without intervening barriers of race or class or religion, the best arguments would rise to the top and we would enter a new utopia of universal agreement. The scale at which this project failed makes me reluctant to ever speculate again about anything regarding online discourse going well. Maybe in the 2030s, the idea that propagandabots would be either easily dispatched, or else model netizens writing good content, will seem just as naive as the early 2000s vision. And the chatbot propaganda apocalypse is a popular thing to believe in without any clear definition, and there will surely be some celebrated cases of chatbots causing mischief, so I’m setting myself up to fail here by the standards I mentioned in Nostradamus to Fukuyama. Still, I do want to go on record as doubting the strongest form of this thesis. As for predictions: If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend for more than a month who turned out to (unknown to them) be a chatbot, or who they strongly suspect may have been a chatbot, fewer than 10% will say yes. I may resolve this by common sense if it’s obvious, or by ACX survey if it’s not: 95%
Inline links: SMBC, Nostradamus to Fukuyama
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
AGE OF MIRACLES AND WONDERS: We seem to be in the beginning of a slow takeoff. We should expect things to get very strange for however many years we have left before the singularity. So far the takeoff really is glacially slow (everyone talking about the blindingly fast pace of AI advances is anchored to different alternatives than I am) which just means more time to gawk at stuff. It’s going to be wild. That having been said, I don’t expect a singularity before 2028.
Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers
August 06, 2024 · Original source
So my challenge to the vitalists is to pretend to really try. This challenge is self-enforcing; the more people (including the audience who they’re signaling to) are thinking about it, the more natural it becomes. I think once they do that, most of the local difference between vitalism and altruism will disappear. Then we can leave the terminal differences for after the Singularity, just like every other impossible ethical paradox.
Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
September 10, 2024 · Original source
Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes:
Inline links: has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.”
Third, those uniformly distributed across techno-economic advances. You’d use this to answer questions like “how likely is it that the most important discovery/invention in history thus far happens during my lifetime?” This seems like the right way to predict things like nuclear weapons, global warming, or the singularity. But it’s harder to measure than the previous two.
How do we move from “most exciting advance in history” to questions about the singularity or the apocalypse?
It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism
January 02, 2025 · Original source
The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor. Working at or founding a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone’s existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall wealth distribution will stay approximately fixed.
This may not result in catastrophic poverty. Maybe the post-Singularity world will be rich enough that even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI) plus private charity will let even the poor live like kings (though see here for a strong objection). Even so, the idea of a small number of immortal trillionaires controlling most of the cosmic endowment for eternity may feel weird and bad. From No Set Gauge:
Inline links: see here
Fifth, what about space colonization? This will be a natural interest of post-singularity humans. Someone will have to divy up galactic property; someone will have to fund the colony ships; either way gives a chance for someone to think about wealth inequality on the ensuing colonies. But also, there are 3,000 billionaires in the world today and 400 billion stars in the galaxy. There’s no way to get one current-billionaire per star, and (as we already discussed), after the Singularity, wealth inequality ceases to increase further. Playing out how this could work, most of the options seem benign, for example:
Links For February 2025
February 27, 2025 · Original source
35: Related: L Rudolf L (author of the post on capital/labor in the Singularity that I discussed here) has a proposed History Of The Future scenario (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) tracking what he thinks will happen from now to 2040. Extremely slow takeoff, assumes alignment will be solved, etc - I want to challenge some of these assumptions, but will wait until a different scenario I’m waiting on gets published. The part I found most interesting here is Rudolf’s suggestion that there will be neither universal unemployment nor UBI, but a sort of vapid jobs program where even after AI can make all decisions without human input, the government passes regulations mandating that humans be “in the loop” (using safety as a fig leaf) and we get a world where everyone works forty hour weeks attending useless meetings where everyone tells each other what the AIs did and then rubber stamps it - sort of like the longshoremen “hereditary fiefdoms” that were in the news last year.
Inline links: here, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn’t yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the amount of compute (and therefore money) it would take to build AI. DeepMind was the first victim; originally founded on high ideals of prioritizing safety and responsible stewardship of the Singularity, it hit a financial barrier and sold to Google.
This subsidary was supposedly a “capped forprofit”, meaning that their investors were capped at 100x return - if someone invested $1 million, they could get a max of $100 million back, no matter how big OpenAI became - this ensured that the majority of gains from a Singularity would go to humanity rather than investors. But a capped forprofit isn’t a real kind of corporate structure; in real life OpenAI handles this through Profit Participation Units, a sort of weird stock/bond hybrid which does what OpenAI claims the capped forprofit model is doing.
Does Any Of This Matter For Singularity Believers?
The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you. You will grow weary of green wine and sick of crimson seas. But if you can bring yourself to really pay attention, to see old things for the first time, then you can combine the limitless variety of modernity with the awe of a peasant seeing an ultramarine mural - or the delight of a 2025er Ghiblifying photos.
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
January 02, 2026 · Original source
The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity.
In 2014, I wrote In The Future Everyone Will Be Famous To Fifteen People. The argument was: suppose humanity ends up occupying millions of galaxies. People will still remember Earth as a special time. The mountainous mass of future historians will press down upon a tiny speck of current people. There’s no reason the colony ships won’t contain flash-drives of the whole 2026-era Internet, so, rather than being limited to a few prominent figures, these historians can study the generation around the Singularity almost in its entirely.
Inline links: In The Future Everyone Will Be Famous To Fifteen People