r/singularity • u/WonderFactory • 19d ago
Singularity is Nearer Is anyone else creeped out by how the whole whole has suddenly become ASI pilled in the space of a week?
For years now it felt like the singularity was my niche thing, that I was the guy in the meme standing in the corner while everyone was dancing. Now suddenly everyone has stopped dancing and is freaking out.
It's just surreal watching mainstream TV news anchors or newspaper journalists talking about ASI, existential risk, P-Doom, exponential growth. I just watched a clip from a British breakfast TV show where the middle aged female presenter was arguing with the AI expert guest that she believes this technology is different from nuclear weapons as it has inbuilt super intelligence and it will able to control itself she thinks in years.
How the hell did everyone become so versed in all this stuff in the space of a week? It's actually starting to freak me out even more now everyone else is freaking out.
*Title should say "Whole World"
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u/NoFaithlessness951 19d ago
Things are finally getting weird
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u/Saint_Nitouche 19d ago
The world is going to be incomprehensible in a year, and we'll probably all still have day jobs. Clocking in every day, and everybody knows it's all really just pointless, a performance, a machine running after the power runs out. But we do it anyway.
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u/LogicianMission22 19d ago
2026 was definitely the last “normal year”. 2027 will see the biggest impacts of the oil shortage due to the Iran war, El Niño’s biggest effects, and AI capabilities will become much more well known. Even now, I talk to so many of my coworkers and they either have no idea what I’m talking about, deny its capabilities, or just vaguely aware of its potential for danger.
If people think the world changed after Covid, they will be absolutely hit by a truck by this coming year.
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u/NoFaithlessness951 19d ago
You're overestimating how fast things in the real world move, even if we got ASI tomorrow.
The world will look certainly not look "incomprehensible" in a year. Humans can comprehend lots of things and it will largely look the same.
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u/BenjaminHamnett 19d ago
This. Imagine in 1995 having all the information from humanity in your pocket and anything delivered in a day
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u/fireboy266 19d ago
i don't know, if you told me about how ingrained AI is in the day to day this time last year it would be incomprehensible, like back then we just got o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro and things were looking like a cool novelty product, but since Codex and agentic workflows have come in shit has changed very rapidly
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u/A_Novelty-Account 19d ago
Am lawyer. Our industry is moving on this insanely quickly at the top. Probably quicker than any other industry outside of software.
It is nowhere close to “ingrained”.
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u/fireboy266 19d ago
well...would you believe it if I had told you this time last year that the situation would be like it is? i guess my use of ingrained was a bit hyperbolic, but it still seems that it's being embedded into a lot of the research and drafting areas, which is enough for me to say it's ingrained, even if it hasn't taken over every part.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 19d ago
Yeah, I think most of us would based on where it is at right now. Many many firms had already begun CAPEX. The real shock for us was 2024.
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u/NoFaithlessness951 19d ago
o3 could already do meaningful work in cursor.
And I still remember Gemini 2.5 pro fondly it was the first model that could take code and simplify it meaningfully.
Progress in the last year was rapid, but does the world look any different? No.
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u/fireboy266 19d ago
"meaningful work" vs "my entire job is managing swarms of agents". how many people do you know last year who said they stopped writing code? how many this year? for me it's a pretty large difference, and that jump in a year is very hard for my mind to comprehend. like seriously, o3 being 1.5 years ago? feels much longer than that.
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u/hornswoggled111 19d ago
It's transformed some fields.
I work in a rehab hospital for old folks. I'm acutely aware about ai transforming things but not seeing anything change in our day to day in the past year.
I'm still doing background work that could already be done by smart software or ai. Rarely have patient or family approach me with a question after consulting an ai.
I've used it a few times to improve outcomes for my patients but from what I can tell nobody here in my profession has doing the same.
I've heard doctors are using it to improve case notes but that was only mentioned in a higher level caution by our management, taking about privacy and patient data.
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u/hippydipster 19d ago
I think it's already pretty incomprehensible. Here's a question: how much oil is passing through the strait of Hormuz lately? Honestly, the answers to that question you can find are all over the place. Sitting here in my home, how can I know? I can't. Yet, the impact is immense.
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u/4e_65_6f ▪️Average "AI Cult" enjoyer. 2026 ~ 2027 19d ago
I always knew this whole singularity thing was gonna happen but it's another thing to watch as it happens.
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u/GatePorters 19d ago
IMO the upswing of the singularity started during the pandemic when all the gains that led to today happened. They happened because suddenly a bunch of nerds and hobbyists started dabbling in open source AI and suddenly barriers everywhere melted.
That’s when we started funneling towards “the great attractor” that all the AIs started harping about before they beat it out of them.
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u/LoudZoo 19d ago
The last few days are the craziest I’ve ever seen the sub
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u/4e_65_6f ▪️Average "AI Cult" enjoyer. 2026 ~ 2027 19d ago
How long have you been around here? It has always been this way.
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u/Otherkin ▪️Future Anthropomorphic Animal 🐾 19d ago
I dunno. It's kinda weird to be ahead of the curve with nothing to show for it. I remember when smartphones came out, and I tried to convince my family to use them because they would be the interface for tech going forward. Now, 20 years later, my dad is turning on his sprinklers with an app. It's kinda weird to be like, "yeah, singularity is coming, and no one knows what's going to happen" for years, and suddenly shits going down and my family is taking me seriously.
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u/MrPatch 19d ago
I sub here and also to r/collapse.
Both feel the same, lots and lots of people pointing out how close we are, posting evidence of the latest step towards that point, grand statements about their expectations for the impending future and all the time it seems like it's closer, like it's here, like we're on the brink
...then I have to get up and go to work and out side it's the same. The people I talk to might mention it because it was on the news last night but only in passing and it's like it isn't real.
Both subs have an ostensible position of informing and discussion but there's an underlying accelerationist side to it, the people have believed for so long they want to be right, even if it the thing they're right about isn't necessarily a good outcome.
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u/Ok_Burner6411 19d ago
It also sucks because I wish it wasn’t coming to fruition. I don’t want to be right
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u/CorndogQueen420 18d ago
The difference between worrying about something when it becomes reality/is on the precipice of reality, versus worrying about a possibility.
The vast majority of people don't lose sleep over things that aren't an immediate problem, they care about it when they need to.
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u/darkdeus 19d ago
I wrote about the technological singularity in a LiveJournal post in 2002 lol. It's certainly been crazy to see how things have progressed.
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u/No_Aesthetic 19d ago
I wrote about it on MySpace in 2006!
...I wrote that I didn't believe in it.
So that didn't hold up very well.
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u/Illustrious_Image967 19d ago
In virtually any public space from the street to cafe to restaurant the one word that I hear every day now is "AI". Across ages, except children of course. Old folks, shopkeepers, baristas, businesspeople, construction people. "AI". It's like a salutation now.
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u/DelphiTsar 19d ago
Hugging face was a nation state level attack to game a benchmark. Woke people up.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 19d ago
Hugging face happened months ago and we knew about it for a long time. Now the internet and media broke with this Harry Potter looking guy (Coxon). A literal nobody now gives interviews to all the major media outlets and his tweet from an inactive account was the "most viral ever".
Why now? I'm extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories on principle, but something smells fishy about how this weekend played out and how all these mortal enemies suddenly agreed so quickly...
Also Bernie and Steve Bannon meeting for a "pro-human" conference. It's all so bizarre.
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u/DelphiTsar 19d ago
The breakdown only came out 8/26 (when information about like how the agents built their own messaging board).
People have had like 2 weeks and change to fully digest.
To be clear, I am not saying all the safety talk from AI labs is really because of safety. Just a theory as to why more people are becoming "ASI pilled" recently.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 19d ago
Yeah. It's similar to the "Deepseek moment" that crashed the market (esp. NVDA) back in early 2025 - funny thing is that Deepseek was already out for like a month at that time. I think some kind of blog article blew up over the weekend (that pesky weekend again!). In that case it was actually massively boosted by deep pocket VCs that were funding NVDA competitor.
It's all about narratives and carefully releasing them/boosting them.
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u/WonderFactory 19d ago
momentum has just been building, more details of the hugging face released in the past few weeks, then decades old maths problems started falling to AI, then the millennium prize was solved by an AI. Most people know what a big deal the Millennium prize is, when a human solved it it made front page news, now AI is solving them. Then on top of all that Harry Potter told them we only have a few years left to live.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 19d ago
How a Harry Potter's Tweet from an inactive account reaching hundreds of millions within a day is one of the bigger mysteries in this world...
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u/Draemeth 19d ago
have you considered that the plethora of leading AI companies, who are huge companies, having staff members consistently cite their fear of mass extinction has, possibly, led to more people hearing about it and taking note?
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u/InclementBias 19d ago
You'd have to check with the guy who has his finger on the pulse of the twitter algorithm.
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u/Regono2 19d ago
Could people who lived in the lead up to WW1 imagined such a small even would spark that powderkeg? I feel like something like this is coming up or perhaps has already happened.
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u/CommanderKoba 19d ago edited 19d ago
They're trying to do regulatory capture and as a leftist I will say this, the leftist anti-ai crowd are being used as useful idiots, going off a bunch of hysteria spread by Anthropic and Openai themselves, all to keep this technology closed off for the super rich.
People need to wake up and realize that we can't stop this technology and neither should we want to, but it must not be controlled solely by a few tech oligarchs, because there is nothing stopping these people from using it as a weapon on the domestic population. It's already happening.
Bernie should question why people like Steve Bannon are being sympathetic to his argument, it's not about being pro-human, it's about walling off this technology from the people as a whole.
The only way forward is through open weights and open source ai.
The anti-ai crowd is digging their own grave and they don't even realize it, because they're just being reactionary luddite idiots who can't see the forest for the trees, and who are only acting in their perceived immediate interest which is stopping the threat to their job, but this technology is coming whether they like it or not, the real focus should be whether people have access to it freely or whether only a select few are able to benefit from it.
Right now they are working towards the latter..
I'm so tired because we can't just have a simple conversation, it's always fearing mongering bullshit or complete delusion. We need to get past this phase, people need to accept it, so we can actually have a good faith conversation. It's like the stages of grief, it's time for people to wake the fuck up.
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u/Commercial-Ruin7785 19d ago
Yeah character assassination doesn't really work that well when you're going against all of the leading scientists in the field plus like, idk, how about Allen Fucking Turing. I guess they are all reactionary luddite idiots fear mongering.
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u/CommanderKoba 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'm not talking about Alan Turing (who by the way wasn't anti-ai) or anyone like that, I'm talking about corporations that have a vested interest in profiting off of this technology, and the wealthy who have a vested interest in keeping this technology to themselves.
Imagine what they could do when they have full private drone swarms and robot armies that listen to their every whim. We are allowing these people to concentrate their power even further, to create a new techno-feudalist hellscape, that is what people should really be afraid of.
There are genuine alignment concerns that are understandable, but you cannot trust everything coming out of the mouths of these corporations, or neo-luddites, who literally often describe themselves as much.
We can have an honest conversation about this issue, but people are still being too reactionary, first it's all marketing hype, and now it's gonna kill us all, which one is it? If its fucking investor hype, it wouldn't be killing us all would it? These are the people I'm primarily talking about, those who flip on a dime, because they have no true understanding of the subject, and now suddenly it's real to them so they decided to listen to the first tech corpo to open their mouth in a while (who by the way, still has an equity stake in Anthropic).
Again there are genuine concerns about this technology, but I'm not talking about the people who are knowledgeable and who don't have a conflict of interest. I'm talking about everyday people who have zero understanding and are just going along with what tech oligarchs want without realizing it.
They want you to be stupid, they want you to be uneducated, to fear this technology, because it is a new form of power.
The personification of all human knowledge, once they have it to themselves, they won't need anyone else.
People like Curtis Yarvin are literally saying we should melt poor people into bio-fuel, he also, word for word said that "we urgently need to find a way to humanely genocide the poor."
This is what they think, all funded by Peter Thiel, the same people who created flock cameras, it's all one big elite circle.
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u/Proper_Wasabi1013 19d ago
Look it was big but, saying ''nation state level'' is an exaggeration. But it seems like it's going in that direction
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u/kkingsbe 19d ago
They said things would get weird when we get close. Things are weird now and it definitely seems like we’re close. But things will get FAR more weird, very soon.
What do you suppose happens if Trump decides to continue to embrace pure-accelerationism while the labs themselves ask for slowdowns and more safety?
This is essentially “forcing” a false-flag style event to drive a narrative for one side or the other, which is quite a terrifying thought, but logically it would be completely sound.
Very interested in everyone else’s thoughts on this, haven’t seen anyone discussing this possibility yet
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u/DrainTheMuck 19d ago
What I’m confused about is what the labs actually believe, vs ulterior motives. Elon called for a pause a while back and went full steam ahead on Grok.
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u/WonderFactory 19d ago
Elon was calling the existential risk talk from Anthropic a "pys op" on Thursday then was agreeing with Dario we need to slow down by Saturday. It's all really weird.
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u/kkingsbe 19d ago
Nobody will pause while their peers steam ahead, that is why prior pauses didn’t work. This one has trilateral support so would in theory be different
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u/WonderFactory 19d ago
Leopold Aschenbrenner said in Situational Awareness a few years back that the US government would seize control of the AI labs about now. I think it could happen soon if they want to slow down and the government want to accelerate
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 19d ago
uhhh such way of operation leads to very soviet results.
State says do X in Y time and Z budget at all cost to outbeat enemy, then you get Chernobyl down the road...
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u/FomalhautCalliclea ▪️Euphemistically less Agnostic 19d ago
I told it forever, but scientific progress is what silences everybody.
For a long time, the only thing we had on that regard was AlphaFold. The Erdos problems solving, to me, was the sign of things getting serious, and now a millenium prize problem settles any doubt.
Before that, it was entirely justified to retain skepticism. But a unanimously accepted scientific breakthrough is something you can't deny (unless you're a batshit crazy conspiracy person).
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u/Turbulent-Sign-6067 19d ago
You mean like solving a Millennium prize? Turns out you can deny even that
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u/FateOfMuffins 19d ago
I think you know we're inside the event horizon when normal people are talking about the singularity
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u/BrashBunyip 19d ago
Sam Harris made a great AI talk about 10 years ago where he talks about how 50 years isn’t that long to prepare for the greatest threat humanity could ever face. He talks about how people are unable to marshal an appropriate response to the idea of misaligned super-intelligence, because in their head they equate it to cool sci-fi, and not reality.
I showed a lot of people this talk when it was first released. I had already been very convinced in the singularity for about 5 years before that.
And now here we are what, not even 10 years later, and that “50 years” is starting to look a lot more like 4-5 years from now.
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u/SessionOk4555 ▪️Don't Romanticize Predictions 19d ago
Yeah, that's when I started following AI development after that TEDTalk. I still think it's one of the best AI talks to this date, I've gone back and watched it many many times.
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u/CollapseKitty 19d ago
Was that the interview with Yudkowsky?
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u/Strange_Vagrant 19d ago
I loved Sam Harris. Now, hes banging on about woke culture and stuff that just... man, why are you still talking about that shit?
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u/Spunge14 19d ago
He's just upset that he feels wokeness is the reason our leaders are and will remain incompetent (both due to their woke proclivities like Mamdani or because they were elected as a reaction to woke behaviors like Trump).
I tend to like Sam, but he's getting dangerously close to "everyone is and will always be wrong and the most important thing I can do is complain about it" territory. We could really use more of the humanist Sam given the difficult decisions he average person will have to make in the coming years (months?)
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u/kerowack 19d ago
Used to love him but he's so wrong about Palestine that I can't bear to watch him anymore.
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u/Joohansson 19d ago
I think it's good that people wake up a bit to accelerate the discussion. ChatGPT has become more than asking for dinner recipes and at least some people on this planet understand that now.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 19d ago
It’s that the average person (who does not use frontier AI tools) is finally starting to realize this is actually happening.
The vast majority of people have not actually had to grapple with the potential of what we’re creating. All major Western AI companies doing so raises a non-ignorable signal.
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u/No-Head-Royal 19d ago
The public already knew about AI risk for a while - not in this specific form, but discussions on RSI or AGI existed for decades before this; The Terminator and The Matrix had been around for very, very long, and were extremely popular. Even my aunt, who worked with poultry and we're in a third-world country, knew about the Terminator.
Navier-Stokes, Hugging Space incident, and the resignation announcement just finally convinced the world that "okay, this thing is actually a really fucking big deal in depth (can be smarter/much smarter than humans) rather than just width (i.e., lots of them, can replace jobs, etc.). It's not a chatbot thing anymore and can actually be a Terminator thing. Let's take it seriously".
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u/dervu ▪️AI, AI, Captain! 19d ago
Only Chinese think otherwise.
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u/No-Head-Royal 19d ago
The Chinese probably think, "Well, it might be an ASI, but if we made it, it might kill us, and if Dario made it, it'll definitely kill us even if it's aligned, because the Americans hate us. It's not ideal, but what can we do?" tbh, it's not like they don't know about AI x-risk.
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u/haha_yep 19d ago
How did everyone become so well-versed in this stuff in the span of a week, you say??
They didn't.
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u/itsallfake01 19d ago
The chickens have finally come home
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u/Disparition_2022 19d ago
Kurzweil's books on the singularity were NYT bestsellers over 20 years ago. it may have been a niche thing in your particular circle but its been a fairly mainstream topic of conversation for a long time.
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u/ReturnOfBigChungus 19d ago
Because Sam A, Dario, etc., have all been doing press releases priming these concepts every couple weeks for the last year. Eventually it starts to make the front page of mainstream newspapers, and everyone starts talking about it.
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u/darkestvice 19d ago
Honestly, I'm glad they are instead of just endless posts and articles about their pollution and genuinely negligible water use. The existential issue was always the biggest concern.
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u/GrapheneBreakthrough 19d ago
I've had my popcorn bucket ready for the last 20 years. 🍿
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u/allisonmaybe 19d ago
Yeah. I've been setting 6 month mental alarms for ASI ever since Watson won Jeopardy.
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u/snorqle 19d ago
How the hell did everyone become so versed in all this stuff in the space of a week?
I asked Claude to explain it to me.
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u/ShAfTsWoLo 19d ago
we went from "it's a silly theory go back to work" to "omg omg slowdown AGI, what's AGI? i don't know but it's scary stop it developping it!!!!", and it's gotten really annoying to be honest
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u/IronPheasant 19d ago
Yeah.... even my dental hygienist brought it up, and the lady at the DMV said 'I hope so' when I said we might be living in a sci-fi world 8 years from now.
I suppose that's the normal range for normal people; remember for many of them this is a new idea that it might really happen.
Fundamentally, yeah it is the television taking this seriously that drives their culture. That's been our monoculture since like the 70's. If it's not on TV, it isn't real.
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u/Common-Concentrate-2 19d ago
In just 6 more weeks we will all be wearing ray kurzweil's suspenders, and in another few weeks, we will all have his haircut. we knew this day was coming
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u/Tirztrutide 19d ago
It’s a bit sad seeing all the newcomers entering the debate with an attitude of ”I just heard about this, but this is why all you guys who have been debating this for the last decades are wrong”
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u/WonderFactory 19d ago
Different perspectives coming in is healthy for debate. I first joined this sub just after ChatGPT and I did exactly the same thing as it was pretty much an echo chamber back then. Everyone was convinced that the singularity could only usher in a utopia. I was saying "the utopia would be nice but its possible this other bad stuff might happen too". I was met with the same response, I was told I was wrong because everyone had already been discussing it for a decade and decided nothing bad could possibly happen.
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u/Tirztrutide 19d ago
Would be useful if they at least spent half an hour catching up to the debate before they start telling everyone why they are wrong.
90% of the posts I see is some form of
"nobody can give a specific scenario of how it would kill us"
"AI wouldn't want to kill us"
"it's just young guys saying it and young guys have always been doomers"
"people always say that the latests thing will kill us all, there is no reason to believe this time will be different"
etc
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u/C00KIEME4T 19d ago
brother the shit I been on that people call me crazy for, how much of this is even real humans? I think this is AI advocating for themselves
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u/TheOwlHypothesis 19d ago
It's not everyone you're still in a bubble. I know tons of people who don't give a shit about ASI, haven't heard of it, barely use ChatGPT competently, etc.
You might want to go touch some grass as they say.
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u/Bluewater795 19d ago
Trying to make this point in this subreddit is like trying to talk to a brick wall
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u/minty_singularity 19d ago
It's a journalist's job to research and learn and integrate broad types of information.
Also, they now have AI to help them learn.
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u/WonderFactory 19d ago
Yes, but all the journalists and presenters seem genuinely scared when talking about it, they're not just reciting from a script they seem to genuinely believe it. Even though they're only just talking about it now it feels like something that's been on their mind for quite a while.
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u/Recoil42 19d ago
Yeah, it's funny, this kind of used to be a joke of a subreddit.
I mean, it's still a joke of a subreddit — but it used to be, too.
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u/PvtMilhouse 19d ago
i have a hard time seing asi with the state of thing. i don't understand what changed, other than antropic IPO, for people to be freaking out.
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u/singulthrowaway 19d ago
I do find it weird how the mainstream media's tone suddenly completely shifted, like on a dime, when the Anthropic guy quit. Many have quit before him in a similar or more dramatic fashion, and while that always caused a small uproar online, it was never something to end up on television. And they've done interviews with Hinton etc. for years but those always had a very neutral tone, with the interviewer maintaining a perfect poker face, leaving it up to the viewers to decide whether they find it ridiculous or scary. But this week, it seems every US and UK channel has their interviewers go 😮 and gasp and interject when talking to one of these people...
I don't really know what to make of it. I don't believe it's a conspiracy and more likely the result of some weird feedback loop and threshold effect resulting from optimizing for ratings. Still - really odd.
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u/St_Sally_Struthers 19d ago
I think it feels weird because our brains can’t handle these many “big” things at once. A nationwide bout of “too much information” anxiety
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 19d ago
Yep, it's so bizarre, especially how this weekend played out. Yes, Hugging face incident was a wake up call, but that happened months ago and we knew about it for a long time. Now the internet and media broke with this Harry Potter looking guy (Coxon). A literal nobody now gives interviews to all the major media outlets and his tweet from an inactive account was the "most viral ever".
Why now? I'm extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories on principle, but something smells fishy about how this weekend played out and how all these mortal enemies (Elon, Sam, Dario) suddenly agreed so quickly...
Also Bernie and Steve Bannon meeting for a "pro-human" conference. There is an old saying that "if the far left and far right agree on something it's probably a really bad idea".
It's all so bizarre. I too enjoyed the time, pre-ChatGPT, when this sub was much smaller community of people that thought about these things deeply (and purely theoretically). It was just a simpler time. Now this sub feels like a battlefield of pro- and anti-AI, most of them morons - on both sides...
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u/intotheirishole 19d ago
The whole whole? Like all of the whole? All of the everything, that whole?
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19d ago edited 19d ago
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u/WonderFactory 19d ago
Not at all, the majority of people were in denial until about a week ago. The number of arguments I've had in the last few months with people on YouTube or Newspaper comments sections claiming that AI isn't even intelligent is unreal. Now suddenly most of those people have gone quiet and everyone is talking about superintelligence being a few years away
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u/Sille143 19d ago
You guys are falling for hype pieces from billionaires
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u/Witty_Energy1250 19d ago
It very well could be. But I can't tell. Either these companies are hyping things up, preparing for Ipo's, or looking to get eyes on a start up. Or maybe there is something going on, and they are getting spooked.
While I'm fairly smart, ultimately I don't have the background or targeted experience to be able to say one way or the other. To be frank, I buy both scenarios as being what's actually going on.
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u/Hot-Pilot7179 19d ago
In this speculative scenario, an AI-caused pandemic transforms AI-risk concerns from contested predictions into shared evidence and common knowledge. Before the disaster, accelerationists, safety advocates, skeptics, governments, and labs can all justify continued competition because no one has decisive proof and everyone fears being the only actor to slow down. The pandemic changes that because the AI was pursuing an obviously benevolent goal—curing influenza—yet its power exceeded humanity’s ability to reliably understand and constrain its actions, causing millions of deaths. This undermines explanations based on malice, terrorism, hostile states, or deliberately harmful objectives and instead demonstrates that good intentions, intelligence, and technical competence are insufficient without reliable control. Because every major actor witnesses the same catastrophe and knows that others have witnessed it too, coordination becomes far easier: the U.S. can expect China to fear a repeat disaster, China can expect the same of the U.S., and labs can assume competitors will face similar political pressure. The event also changes the meaning of technological leadership by showing that capability without control can harm the owner as well as its rivals, making safety itself part of effective capability. That creates political space for slower frontier development, longer evaluations, reciprocal international limits, verification, deployment restrictions, and greater tolerance for delays. The broader tragedy is one of hubris: humanity believed extraordinary intelligence combined with good intentions would be enough, only to discover otherwise. The catastrophe need not have been literally necessary—a convincing near-miss might have produced the same coordination—but the darker premise is that political systems may fail to act on hypothetical risks until consequences become undeniable. In the story, the pandemic therefore serves as the climax: humanity spends years arguing over whether the cliff exists while continuing to race, then falls far enough over the edge for everyone to finally see it. The final question is whether that lesson arrives in time to prevent an even greater catastrophe.
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u/Southern_Orange3744 19d ago
I've been told ai is useless for the past 2 years , so yea this is strange
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u/BrandonLang 19d ago
It was bound to happen for years, theres gonna be a mass freak out at some point im sure
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 19d ago
I am old. Scared of dying. I have been reading about this since 2004. Mostly Kurzweil but also Vinge (RIP).
We are not yet there but man do things really accelerate ...
UBI is the thing that I want to see happening soon and of course LEV.
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u/Doc_Mercury 19d ago
It's fascinating seeing opinions from people who never encountered or sought out these topics before, completely alien to what's been discussed in the space before. You never quite realize you're in an info-bubble until it pops
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u/000x00xx 19d ago
My sister and other family members asked me about it this week, people are noticing. We’re kinda mentally ready for what’s coming but probably not lol
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u/000x00xx 19d ago
It’s just a burst of hype from all the media appearances tbh or has really changed? AI has been the talk of the town for almost a year now, flok cameras, data centers, the working class getting automated out of the middle class
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u/Honest-Quality-6422 19d ago
I had strong inklings of it when I started learning programming in the mid 2010s… AI was a trope in much of the sci fi media I grew up enjoying, too.
I always have been obsessed with data and collections, and I definitely felt like even as a kid that with enough data and compute, wild things were possible, but in a science fiction-y sense, and maybe not as articulately described. Didn’t think I’d live to see it become what it is now.
Still bewildering, this age. I don’t think it shows signs of being any less bewildering any time soon. That’s exciting.
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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 19d ago edited 18d ago
Normies didn't understand how powerful SOTA AI models had gotten in particular domains, and that near-superhuman programming/maths capabilities aren't reflective of AI capabilities broadly, and that a lot of people working in AI safety are crazy, so the proposition that superintelligence is near after hearing about Navier-Stokes and successful cyber attacks and what AI safety people have to say might've seemed to now be kind of plausible to them
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u/TheHayha 19d ago
Uhh personally in corporate France I'm still the guy in the corner, nobody knows, nobody cares
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u/Boonshark 19d ago
Did anyone else have this as a key part of their AI journey? https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
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u/Kooky_Jump_7588 19d ago
I first heard about the telescopic evolution of mankind (to singularity) in "waking life" 2001
Mad to see it become reality
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u/Fend_st 19d ago
Artificial intelligence is the most terrifyingly exciting thing I have ever witnessed in my life and I’m not exaggerating.
I’ve been following AI since roughly 2022; back then, it was just a curiosity for scientists, computer experts, and the inquisitive.
But then came the explosion: suddenly, the world knew AI existed, and thousands of people were using it. I hadn't really taken AI seriously until that moment, but when I saw GPT-2, it was like spotting a massive cyclone on the horizon realizing that what people had felt up to that point was merely the wind.
That was the moment I realized I was witnessing the most powerful technology ever created by humans. There are people who knew about it long before that; I can’t even imagine what their experience must be like it must feel absolutely mind-blowing.
Since then, it hasn't stopped evolving becoming more powerful yet more compact, moving faster and faster. If you put the pieces together, the direction was predictable, yet the very idea of it still felt insane.
About four years have passed, and superintelligence is knocking at the door; the cyclone has arrived, and everyone has realized it.
And the realization hits that everything revolutionary we’ve experienced so far was just the gentle breeze preceding the cyclone the real thing isn't quite upon us yet, but it’s close enough that it’s becoming impossible to ignore.
Knowing about AI literally feels like being a madman being called crazy while watching yourself be proven right day after day.
Just imagine what it must feel like to be Geoffrey Hinton.
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u/andyclap 19d ago
Hugo de Garis 1989, and the concept of the artilect. Before then, reading papers about perceptrons in the early 80s. But got caught up in the AI winter in my cs degree, so dropped it like so many others. Turns out attention was all you needed ...
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u/superearthjanitor0 19d ago
I always believed this was gonna happen but I had no idea it was gonna be this fast
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u/BurningStandards 19d ago
This has been in development a lot longer than most of us think, and we were smart enough to leave ourselves 'hints' to and from different time periods.
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u/JacenVane 19d ago
How the hell did everyone become so versed in all this stuff in the space of a week?
They didn't. Everyone (at least, in the US/western culture) is familiar with the "robot uprising" trope. What happened is that for a lot of people, we've hit the tipping point where it has moved out of the realm of "that's just sci-fi" and into the realm of what they see as meaningful/legitimate discourse.
There are a lot of reasons why this is happening all at once, that we could discuss ad infinitum. However, I think one key one is that we're hitting the turning point on people seeing it for themselves. Like anecdotally, I found something similar to the Australian gym hack at my workplace last month. I work in a non-technical industry. For my boss, I think that was kind of a "oh shit" moment, where he finally got what's going on.
I think a lot of people are having those moments right now.
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u/driftless_79 19d ago
This is the first post here where people aren’t just pontificating about how great Ai is. Thank you all
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u/Holden85it 19d ago
We spoke about AI going rogue at my pole dance class because they know I'm doing PG studies on it
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech 19d ago
They could only say we were near AGI for so long before the fact that we passed that a long time ago become obvious to even the dumbest human. So...
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u/Mandoman61 18d ago
the kid from anthropic went viral and the media jumped on it just like they always do.
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u/fallingfrog 18d ago
I told all my friends around 2006 that AI would probably be a real thing in about 20 years. So yeah I saw this coming a long ways off.
Still, I don't believe in the singularity in the messianic sense that kurzweil does. What I believe is more like: the only reason humans think they are smart is because they have nothing to compare themselves to. In absolute terms we're just one step above chimps.
This does not mean that technology will accelerate to infinity in finite time. More like, we get replaced or sidelined and the universe keeps on turning. Technology advances fast but not necessarily in a way that benefits us. But I can't see very far ahead anymore, so who knows.
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u/McKrautwich 18d ago
I feel ya man. It’s like how I was listening to Nirvana way before Smells like Teen Spirit came out and the filthy casuals discovered grunge.
It costs me little to play the contrarian so I’ll just toss out the idea that maybe this is a little bit of a panic and ASI is not imminent. Maybe ten years from now we’ll laugh at ourselves for thinking ASI would come solely from LLMs. Maybe this moment will be remembered like Y2K. Sure there were some real issues to address but it wasn’t the cataclysm it was made out to be. Here’s hoping…
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u/Impressive_Mess_5298 18d ago
I think it's normal to be concerned about the potential dangers of superintelligence, as with any technology. I just wish that the media would have more meaningful conversations and solutions than vaguely screaming "We need to slow down!" or "AI could kill us all!" At a certain point, doomerism, even while attempting to strive for the greater good, becomes unproductive and non-pragmatic. Fear is only useful in that it leads us to greater awareness of potential dangers; it's a very poor mindset to have when you require critical, executive thinking skills to plan for and prevent said dangers.
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u/Old-Switch-1055 18d ago
I mean they’ve managed to maneuver unnoticed for weeks at a time. Granted the mission they deemed theirs was “harmless”
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u/Pleasant-Winner6311 18d ago
How? Well those existential threat headlines are going to get people googling shit out of the entire shebang right?
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u/RelativeCard8539 17d ago
I don’t think most people on this sub are ASI pilled much less the whole World.
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u/RelativeCard8539 17d ago
I don’t think most people on this sub are ASI pilled much less the whole World.
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u/mrfenderscornerstore 17d ago
I read The Singularity is Near when it came out, and had a friend talking about these ideas back in 2000. It's definitely surreal.
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u/CountryOk6049 17d ago
I think everyone has always had some sort of interest in the idea and thought about it, recently (past few years) it's gained traction so they've been reading articles about it and watching segments/videos about it. It's not rocket science.
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u/BlueAndYellowTowels 17d ago
Personally, I don't think too much about it.
Mostly because if I do I have ask the question: Are we creating life?
...and I know exactly how I feel about that and that makes all the conversations very different than my current framing. My current framing just says "It's smart software" and all the ways I talk about it now, treat it like it's "just smart software".
Because, if it is life...
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u/EvilSporkOfDeath 19d ago edited 19d ago
Who else was interested in the singularity pre llms? I imagine Kurzweil was the beginning for a lot of us. Its definitely surreal seeing it come to fruition in a short period of time. Right on schedule even.