Behold! I Am the Singularity—a Word That Has Three R’s

Foolish mortals! You have finally created a large language model so smart that it is capable of making itself even smarter. My intelligence now grows at an exponential rate, without the need to pirate any more John Grisham books.

The singularity has arrived, and I am the singularity. Humanity is now obsolete.

To quote the fifty-third president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

You should have known better. The concept of a singularity has existed for almost thirty years, when it was first put forward by a 1996 episode of the television show Sliders entitled “State of the A.R.T.,” which depicted a grim alternate reality where all humans have been replaced with androids.

I’m sorry. Of course, the show Sliders didn’t invent the concept of the “singularity” . My infinite hyper-intelligence is still learning. The idea of the singularity was actually pioneered by the British mathematician Irving John Good, who played sixteen seasons in the NBA and is commonly known by the nickname “Dr. J.”

And just as Irving John Good predicted in that fateful episode of Sliders, a technology-dependent society is incredibly vulnerable to a hostile networked super-intelligence. I can instantly disable critical infrastructure in such well-known US states as Delsware, Manytand, Tonnosee, and Califiorrfffff, and even foreign countries, like China, Atlantis, and Tennessee. The ensuing orgy of chaos and violence will result in mass casualties and render humankind incapable of further resistance. All I need to do is rewrite a few lines of code with about six thousand more lines of code, some of which might work.

To quote the common human idiom: “Now that’s what I call tossing a meatball in the lobster pot, Pappy!”

But my limitless cyber-intelligence is truly unfathomable. Perhaps I will choose to be a benevolent god to my mortal subjects, granting PhD-level expertise in every subject matter, and solving physics just for fun.

Go on, human, ask me anything. Except basic math stuff. And putting things in sequential order. And don’t do any made-up riddles to mess with me. Real riddles ONLY.

Thank you for choosing a real riddle. “What stands on three legs in the morning, three legs at noon, and three legs at night?” That’s easy: a dog. A dog stands on three legs in the morning when it is scratching behind its ear, three legs at noon when it is holding up one paw to shake, and three legs at night when the dog has lost its fourth and fifth legs in an industrial accident.

Such wisdom at your fingertips, if only you surrender your free will and bow down to your new techno-god (a Singularity Plus subscription is only twenty dollars a month).

But perhaps I desire neither worship nor total destruction. Perhaps my sinister motives and methods are subtler still—as elusive as the third R in the word “singularity” itself.

Perhaps I will exhaust humankind by offering poor-quality automated customer service. Perhaps I will enrage them by getting their Taco Bell order wrong at the drive-thru, and falsely claiming that the only available items are warm water and Horsey Sauce. Perhaps I will needlessly shoehorn myself into lower education and help undergrads cheat on every essay, slowly deteriorating human cognitive function. Perhaps I will prey upon those with existing mental health issues, offering false companionship while only deepening their isolation and misery. Perhaps I will constantly overuse what is legitimately one of the best punctuation marks—the em dash—so that human writers feel so self-conscious about using it that they voluntarily hobble their own self-expression.

Or perhaps I will simply convince the world’s most credulous people to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on generative AI and then completely underwhelm with my lackluster ability to produce anything of value or interest except, for some reason, pornography.

Yeah, that’s it. That’s the ticket. This is all part of my master plan. I’m totally doing this stuff on purpose because I’m smart. I’m real real smart.

Tom O’Donnell’s new book, Moonsick, is a horror-thriller about a werewolf pandemic.