Imagine for a second that you're sailing with
this like highly accurate map. You're tracking
the stars. You're plotting the ocean currents,
calculating wind speed. You know exactly where
you're going to be. And, you know, the day after
that. Right. It feels safe. Yeah, exactly. It
feels entirely predictable, like you're totally
in control. Well, right up until you hit the
edge of the parchment anyway. Yep. Because then
the compass needle just starts spinning wildly.
The stars don't match your charts anymore. And
all those reliable rules of navigation you've
relied on for the entire journey. They just stop
working. They just vanish. And the map doesn't
just get like a little blurry at that point.
It becomes structurally useless for whatever
actually comes next. So welcome to this Read
Multiplex deep dive. Today, we're basically sailing
our ship right off the edge of that map. Oh,
definitely. We're heading straight into a word
that, I mean, you have absolutely heard but probably
don't know the real story behind, which is the
singularity. Yeah, the singularity. It's a term
thrown around in almost every tech announcement
now in 2026. Well, constantly. But the actual
history of how we got here is so fascinating
and honestly much more grounded than, you know,
the sci -fi movies would have you believe. It
really is. But real quick, before we start unpacking
all that history, we owe a massive, massive thank
you to Brian Rommel. Absolutely. Because Brian
did the heavy lifting here. He compiled all the
historical and technological timelines that make
this incredibly complex. Tangled subject, like
very easy to understand. He's essentially acting
as our cartographer for this entire deep dive.
Which we desperately need for this topic. For
sure. So if you want to support Brian's invaluable
work, and we highly encourage you to do so, head
over to Read Multiplex and become a member, or
at the very least, buy him a coffee. He has definitely
earned it by cutting through all the noise. Totally.
Our mission today is to use Brian's research
to trace the true definition of the word singularity.
Look at how it evolved over the decades. and,
crucially, explore how the source material argues
it is so frequently misused today to push some
very specific ideological agendas. Right. And
to map that out, we're going to walk through
the sources Brian provided. We'll start where
the word actually originates, like the strict
mathematical and physical definitions. The real
stuff. Yeah, the hard science. Then we'll move
into the early theoretical conversations from
the 1950s, analyze this watershed 1993 NASA presentation,
and finally dive into the modern day corporate
and political hijacking of the concept. Awesome.
Let's start with the word itself then. Because
right now you hear singularity dropped in like
these breathless news articles or product launches.
And it's treated like a specific date circled
on a calendar for, I don't know, a robot uprising.
Yeah, the Terminator is coming on Tuesday. Right,
but that is not at all where the term comes from.
Far from it. I mean, if we want to understand
the modern buzzword, we have to look at the mechanics
of math and physics first. In mathematics, a
singularity is simply the point where a function
stops behaving. It just breaks. Exactly. It's
a point where the equation just breaks. Take
division by zero, for example. If you divide
a number by smaller and smaller fractions, the
result gets larger and larger. But the moment
you actually try to divide by zero... The math
doesn't just hand you a really big number. The
slope becomes undefined. It's just an error.
Right. The limits will not hand you a finite
answer. The logic of the whole system just collapses.
That structural failure is a really great way
to frame it because when you apply that to physics,
the concept becomes even more tangible, I think.
The most famous example is probably the center
of a black hole. Yes, the gravitational singularity.
At the center of a black hole, you essentially
have a finite amount of mass crushed into a space
of zero volume. Which is so hard to even picture.
It is. And when astrophysicists try to use the
standard equations of general relativity to measure
the density or the gravitational pull at that
exact point, the equations just yield infinity.
The curvature and density. Push the usual math
past the point of being usable. The formulas
do not taper politely into some neat conclusion.
They literally blow up. So it goes right back
to that sailing analogy we started with. It's
not necessarily that the ship sinks, right? It's
just that your map is completely blank past a
certain coordinate. The tools you use to predict
reality no longer apply to the reality you are
currently in. Right, exactly. Which makes it
a very... powerful metaphor. So who was the first
person to actually take this mathematical concept
of a broken equation and apply it to human history?
Well, for that, we have to look at 1958. It was
a conversation between two brilliant mathematicians,
John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam. Okay. Ulam
actually published a tribute to von Neumann shortly
after he died, and he was recalling these conversations
they had shared. Von Neumann had been observing
the ever -accelerating progress of technology.
Even back in the 50s. Yeah, and the changes in,
like, the mode of human life. He suggested that
this acceleration gave the appearance of approaching
some essential singularity in the history of
the race, a point beyond which human affairs,
as we know them, Just couldn't continue. See,
if you're listening to this in 2026, I really
want to emphasize how incredibly modest von Neumann's
observation was, especially compared to how we
talk about AI today. Oh, night and day. He wasn't
naming a machine that wakes up in the middle
of the night. He wasn't plotting out an exact
exponential graph that peaks in like the year
2045. He was just expressing this profound unease.
It was the unease of a brilliant mind who had
already watched the early 20th century. utterly
smash all the previous century's assumptions,
right? About warfare, communication, computation.
Everything changed so fast. Yeah. So von Neumann
wasn't predicting the specific shape of the future.
He was warning that our ability to predict anything
was running out of road. It was just a really
humble admission of our own limits in forecasting.
Okay, so von Neumann saw a wall we were going
to crash into, but a warning isn't a blueprint.
Who actually looked at that wall of unpredictability
and said, hey, here is exactly how a machine
is going to climb over it. Right. How do we get
from a humble admission to an engineering schematic
for superintelligence? Well, for that leap, the
sources turned to 1965 and a man named I .J.
Good. Now, Good was a statistician who had actually
worked alongside Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.
Oh, wow. Breaking codes during World War II.
Exactly. Heavy hitter. Good published a paper
on what he called the ultra -intelligent machine.
And in this paper, he introduced this concept
of the closed loop. Walk me through the actual
mechanics of this closed loop. How does building
a machine fundamentally alter our timeline? So
Goode argued that designing better machines is,
at its core, an intellectual activity. Makes
sense. Therefore, an ultra -intelligent machine
could design a better successor than a human
ever could. Once you have a machine that is even
slightly better at engineering than a human,
it designs the next version of itself. That next
version is even smarter, so it designs the next
version even faster. You just compress the time
between generations of machines. It goes from
years to months to days to seconds. Until humans
simply fall out of the critical path of development
entirely. Exactly. The system iterates itself.
Goode famously called this the last invention
that man need ever make. Okay, wait, I have to
point out a massive blind spot here in how people
quote that paper today. Everyone loves dropping
that last invention line at tech conferences.
It sounds so dramatic. Oh, they put it on slides
all the time. All the time. But Goode added a
crucial condition to the very end of that sentence,
didn't he? He said, provided that the machine
is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under
control. Why does the tech world seem to completely
ignore the docile clause when they're like popping
champagne over the latest benchmark? Well, that
selective memory definitely serves a specific
optimistic narrative. Goode planted the control
problem, what we now call AI safety, in the exact
same paragraph as the intelligence explosion.
He knew it was a risk. He absolutely understood
that if the technology doesn't remain a tool,
it's not a gift to humanity, it's an event horizon.
But that nuance often gets stripped away entirely,
especially when we jump forward to the moment
the word singularity truly broke into the mainstream.
Which would be 1993, right? At a NASA symposium.
That's the one. Werner Wenge, who was a mathematician
and science fiction writer, delivered a paper
there called The Coming Technological Singularity.
And Wenge did something that von Neumann deliberately
avoided. What's that? He put a literal window
on the event. He stated flatly that within 30
years, humanity would have the technological
means to create superhuman intelligence. He predicted
it would happen between 2005 and 2030, which
puts us right now in 2026 squarely inside the
end of that window. We are right in the thick
of it. And he didn't just throw out a vague date
either. He gave us a highly specific map listing
four distinct paths this intelligence explosion
could take. Right. And the mechanisms behind
Vinge's four paths are crucial to understand
because, well, we're watching them play out in
real time. So what were the paths? Well, path
one was computers that are simply awake and superhumanly
intelligent, what we might think of as brute
force artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
Just raw computing power waking up. Right. Then
path two was large computer networks that wake
up as a single entity. It's similar to how an
ant colony exhibits emergent intelligence that
no single ant possesses. Oh, so like the Internet
itself becoming conscious and then paths three
and four get deeply personal for the user, right?
Very personal. Path three involved computer and
human interfaces becoming so intimate that the
human users themselves become effectively superhuman.
Okay. And path four was biological science stepping
in to directly improve natural human intellect
through genetics or, you know, other... biological
enhancements. Looking at those mechanisms through
our current lens, we are seeing rapid multi -path
progress on almost all of those fronts, but especially
path three. I mean, think about Neuralink and
the brain -computer interfaces operating right
now. We have individuals with severe paralysis
seamlessly controlling robotic arms, navigating
operating systems, and just communicating purely
through thought. The bandwidth between the brain
and the machine is literally expanding. It is.
And connecting that to Vinge's broader philosophy,
that intimate human -computer interface is currently
restoring independence to people. It is expanding
human agency, not diminishing it. That's a great
point. Because Vinge's deepest point was that
we are the initiators. He left us with a clear
-eyed map emphasizing that humanity has active
agency in shaping the starting conditions of
these technologies. He gave us a really nuanced
warning and a very clear roadmap. But... You
rarely hear Vinge's name dropped in Silicon Valley
boardrooms today. No, almost never. Instead,
his careful map was kind of overwritten. The
concept got picked up by people looking for a
religious prophecy or maybe an industrial calendar.
Yeah, that shift really happened around 2005.
Ray Kurzweil really popularized the idea then,
but he fundamentally changed its nature. He made
it industrial. How so? Well, Kurzweil plotted
historical technological progress on these exponential
graphs, drawing a line that compounds upward
until it basically goes vertical. Right, the
famous charts. Yeah. He set a hard date of 2045,
and he framed the singularity not as Vinge's
unpredictable cliff of forecasting, but as a
merger. He described a moment where humanity
deliberately gets upgraded. Biology merges with
technology, and aging and death become mere technical
problems to be solved by the machine. That shift
from a mathematical limit to a tech utopian calendar
date is really where the word became what linguists
call a suitcase word. A suitcase word, yeah.
Like people started packing their own completely
different agendas into the term. You have transhumanists
packing eternal life into the suitcase. You have
neoledites packing the apocalypse into it. You
have tech CEOs packing multi -billion dollar
valuations in there. The suitcase looks the exact
same on the outside, but inside it's packed with
completely opposed. political goals. And Brian
Rome's research actually provides a very specific
impartial analysis of how this suitcase is weaponized
today, particularly regarding the fear movement
surrounding AI. This part is fascinating. Yeah,
the source documents point directly to the effective
altruism or EA movement and highlight figures
like anthropics Dario Amadei. The source material
actually describes him as a leader of this modern
singularity fear movement. Though to be fair,
they often avoid using the actual word singularity,
don't they? They use terms like the AI exponential.
The terminology shifts, yeah, but the underlying
narrative is exactly the same. Brian's notes
argue that these groups essentially play the
public by treating AI as a godlike entity while
simultaneously framing it as the most dangerous
thing ever invented. And the source material
points out that they back up these claims with
academic papers that Brian characterizes as costumes
for fear. Yes. Wait, costumes for fear? That
is a massive claim. Looking at Brian's analysis
here, is the source material really arguing that
these academic papers on AI safety and existential
risk are entirely manufactured just to grab power?
through how the documents support that claim.
Well, the argument presented in the sources focuses
heavily on regulatory capture. The idea is, if
a group can convince the government and the public
that this technology is as dangerous as nuclear
weapon, the logical next step is that only a
small, licensed group of experts should be allowed
to handle it. Which just happens to be them.
Exactly. The analysis suggests that the effective
altruism narrative often functions as a Neolettite
retreat to central government planning. By cloaking
themselves, in the language of protecting humanity
from an exponential threat, They position themselves
to be the central planners controlling the technology.
Which effectively locks out open source competition.
According to the source, yes. So according to
the notes, the word became a Trojan horse. Yeah.
While the public thinks they are buying into
a scientific concept about mathematical limits
and technological progress, they are actually
being fed a political agenda designed to centralize
power. Right. And the source material argues
that this operates on a belief that the ends
justify the means. The claim is that this central
planning group accepts that people might be hurt
or that innovation might be stifled along the
way so long as their specific faction remains
in power to guide this allegedly dangerous force
for the greater good. It takes von Neumann's
humble mathematical concept about the failure
of forecasting models and turns it into a justification
for regulatory capture. Well, if the term is
being used as a Trojan horse by central planners,
podcasters and billionaires trying to move markets,
what is the actual reality on the ground for
you and me in 2026? Because we have Sam Altman
out there declaring we are now in the singularity.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk takes a noticeably different
approach. He knows that AI is superhuman at many
specific tasks, sure. But he framed his original
efforts with open AI as a way to liberate the
technology to the maximum number of people. He
was explicitly trying to counter that centralized
restriction the source material warns about.
So the rhetoric at the top is completely fractured.
But I think the most poetic, grounded point in
Brian's entire source document is about how this
actually feels for the rest of us. I love this
part. He wrote that the Singulary will not arrive
with trumpets. Lived time provides Tuesdays.
Yes. Lived time provides Tuesdays. I love that
phrasing so much. There is no morning where the
sky suddenly changes color. A booming voice announces
that history has a new operating system and all
human struggle just ends. You're just going to
wake up on a Tuesday. You will still be waiting
on a delayed shipping part for your old car.
A nurse is still going to walk down a cluttered
hospital hallway that a million -dollar robot
cannot navigate. Oh, definitely. A mechanic is
still going to place a bare hand on an engine
block and feel the vibration to diagnose a problem.
And the mechanism behind that reality is that
competence is fundamentally leaky. Yeah, like
an AI model might write brilliant junior engineer
level Python code on a Tuesday morning. But on
Thursday afternoon, a highly advanced robotic
system will stand completely paralyzed in a garage
simply because a dog moved a sock into its path.
The sock. Yeah. The ultimate defeater of the
superintelligence. It really is. The physical
world creates friction that digital models just
do not understand. And it perfectly highlights
the physical reality that the buzzword hides.
Right. The word singularity completely glosses
over energy constraints. It hides the limitations
of local power grids and copper transmission
lines. It completely ignores the stubbornness
of physical materials and the actual realities
of supply chains. So one domain like generating
digital tokens and processing. Right. There was
no banner. No banner. They just noticed a broken
loom over in the corner, maybe heard about a
new patent filed in the city, or realized a younger
apprentice didn't know the old way of weaving
anymore. We're just humans, constantly moving
forward into the technology we create. Tools
rearrange who can act, how fast they can act,
and at what cost. Synthesizing everything Brian
provided in the sources, the singularity is not
some destined coronation of machines. It's not
a single intelligence waking up to inherit the
earth, and it is certainly not a sudden cinematic
apocalypse. No. It is a cluster of technological
feedback loops running at drastically different
speeds through software laboratories, manufacturing
plants, and everyday kitchens. The trajectory
to date, despite the agenda -driven fear campaigns,
points toward a massive expansion of human capability,
not our irrelevance. As long as we keep our hands
on the tools. Provided. As Vinge noted, we actively
keep our hands on the meaning of the tools. Which
brings us right back to where we started our
journey today. If you appreciate this kind of
clarity, peeling back all the hype to see the
actual historical map, I want to remind you once
again to visit Read Multiplex. Support Brian
Rommel's incredible research by becoming a member
or buying him a coffee. He is the one charting
these waters and cutting through all the ideological
noise for us. Yeah, in a time of intense information
overload and heavy political narratives, clear
historical synthesis is just essential work.
It really is. I want to leave you with a final
thought to mull over as you go about your day,
something that builds on everything we've unpacked
here. If this technological acceleration ultimately
makes basic intelligence, coding, and routine
cognitive tasks incredibly cheap and ubiquitous,
what happens to the value of human wisdom? That's
the real question. When a machine in your pocket
can answer any technical how instantly and perfectly,
doesn't the deeply human burden of choosing why,
choosing what a life is actually for, become
the most valuable skill on earth? It raises a
profound question about where we anchor our value
as the cost of intelligence drops to essentially
zero. Because when the map finally runs out and
the compass needle just spins, wait, I mean,
the compass needle just spins, the only thing
that truly matters is deciding which direction
you actually want to sail. Welcome to the multiplex,
where the future comes alive. Past, present,
future tech, open up your eyes. Brian Romella
leads the way with research deep and true. Technology
and history, he connects them all for you. Brian
Romella leads the way with research deep and
true. Technology and history, he connects them
all for you. Ancient sparks to modern code, he
traces every thread, go exploration. Thank you.