Hey, the singularity is like, five years away

by Not Sure

29 June 2025

A drawing of a dragon and a tree

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

 

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

https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2025/01/30/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/