Hey,
the singularity is like, five years away
by Not Sure
29 June 2025
It
[Ragnarök] sates itself on the life-blood of fated men,
paints red the powers' [gods] homes with crimson gore.
Black become the sun's beams in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous. Do you still seek to know? And what?
Völuspá from Poetic Edda, Ursula Dronke
translation
Artificial General Intelligence
On the
Google DeepMind website there’s an article from April 2 of this year, “Taking a
responsible path to AGI.” AGI is
Artificial General Intelligence. This is
described as a theoretical form of artificial intelligence which will match or
exceed human intelligence across a wide range of tasks. The article touts all the wonderful things
that AGI will do but then cautions that “even a small possibility of harm must
be taken seriously and prevented” and outlines all the risks that must be
anticipated and mitigated against. The
DeepMind authors have witnessed “the misuse of present-day generative AI”
including “producing harmful content or spreading inaccurate information.” They
worry that “In the future, advanced AI systems may have the capacity to more
significantly influence public beliefs and behaviors in ways that could lead to
unintended societal consequences.” They
better get the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and Cass “Nudge ‘em” Sunstein
involved so that any AI-induced influence on public beliefs and behaviors is in
line with the influence (and behavior modification) which the gods intend.
Singularity
Years
ago, Peter Thiel was playing ‘the god who loved the future.’ In a New York Times article from 2010,
he said about the singularity, “I think there is no good future in which it
doesn’t happen.”
What is the
singularity? It’s a hypothetical point
where technology gets away from human control and this is irreversible. Ray “The Transhumanist” Kurzweil has been
psyched up about this for years and declared the Singularity would arrive in
the mid-2040s. To prep for this great
time, he tirelessly writes and talks about all things transcendent, takes more
than 150 supplements daily, and invests in cryonics, in the hopes that his
mortal coil can be revived. When asked
if God exists, he likes to quip, “Not yet.”
Google’s
co-founder, Sergey Brin, came out of retirement, just like Moses, to lead the
Alphabet to the Promised Land of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Evidently, Brin’s burning bush moment was
when a buddy said something like, “Dude!
You’re in computers, man. AGI is
gonna be, like, whoa.” He returned to
the office in late 2023, just in time to appear on podcasts to tell us, “I
mean, when you say 10 years, though, a lot of people are saying, hey, the
singularity is like, five years away. So your ability to see through that into
the future… Yeah, I mean, it’s very hard.”
Our gods do not hail from Olympus but from Silicon Valley and they don’t
speak majestically, like gods of old.
Gods Behaving Badly
All gods appear in epic
poems and holy books and most gods have amazingly adulterous sex lives. Start with The Life and Loves of Zeus to
understand Gods Behaving Badly. Sergey Brin’s
first wife was Anne Wojcicki. She’s into
genomics and tracking our DNA, to help us. She’s also the sister of the late Susan
Wojcicki, who for a decade prior to her death was the CEO of YouTube (owned by
Google.) It was in Susan’s garage that
Sergey and Larry Page started Google.
Yes, Virgina, Google started in a humble Palo Alto garage. Brin’s second wife was Nicole Shanahan. This union delivered a daughter of the gods
to the world but sadly ended when Shanahan had a ‘brief affair’ with Elon Musk. Shanahan would go on to be Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.’s running mate for the 2024 U.S. Presidential race. Recently, she had a Druidic-style love
ceremony of commitment with a man she met at the Burning Man festival. Forty years since its first desert
‘happening’, it’s no longer a hip event, but perhaps now it functions like
Tinder, in real life.
Freed from the constraints
of a (publicly viewable) romantic entanglement, Brin can now put his godly
vigor to making good his promise that Google’s Gemini “will be the very first
AGI.” Stealing a line from Sherlock
Holmes, he declared, “the final race to AGI is afoot.”
Antichrist
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel is
now playing ‘the god who fears the future’ and in the last few years has given
a series of talks and interviews about AI and Apocalypse and Armageddon, using
ancient prophecy to decode this scary world we find ourselves in where tech
might destroy us. Earlier this week, he
was interviewed by Ross Douthat, host of the New York Times “Interesting
Times” podcast in an episode entitled “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist” to which
one blogger asked, “Why didn’t the New York Times think to ask Thiel if he
was the antichrist?” Thiel’s worries
center around the possibility that AI gets out of control and this leads to
some sort of totalitarian government. He
should relax. With a net worth of more
than $20 billion and a 4.5% ownership of Palantir, Inc. he is well-suited for
the clash of the gods against AGI.
Thiel named Palantir after
the ‘seeing stones’ in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings mythology. When Thiel was ‘the god who loved the future’
lecturing at universities about the ecstatic heights to which tech would take
us, J.D. Vance was a young student in the audience who embraced that vision. Or perhaps he didn’t so much embrace the
vision, as he was picked and groomed by Thiel, his path made clear, his future
made bright. The lesser gods and
priestly class in place, Palantir now ‘sees’ all, from Washington D.C. to
Israel.
Ragnarök
Norse mythology brought us
Ragnarök, the foretelling of impending events, catastrophic natural disasters,
the world on fire and then submerged underwater. The world will rise again, cleansed and
fertile, with two surviving humans, a male and a female. But oh, the tragedies that occur at the end
of an age, The Twilight of the Gods.
© Not Sure
Additional reading:
Not Sure -
archive
https://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/Not_Sure.html
Taking a
responsible path to AGI
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/taking-a-responsible-path-to-agi/
Merely
Human? That’s So Yesterday
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html
Peter
Thiel and the Antichrist
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antichrist-ross-douthat.html
The
Stargate Project: Trump Touts $500 Billion Bid For AI Dominance
Sergey
Brin crashes Google I/O with bold AGI claim: “We’ll build the first one”
https://yourstory.com/ai-story/google-sergey-brin-agi-announcement-2025
Transcript
of Sergey Brin’s Interview At All-In Live from Miami
https://singjupost.com/transcript-of-sergey-brins-interview-at-all-in-live-from-miami/
AI and
technology
https://www.bi.team/focus-areas/ai-technology/