The Singularity is Nigh

John Sydenham

I occasionally use software AIs when I write little hobby projects such as my desktop calendar etc. I don’t like AIs because they de-skill me. I had only turned to the AIs in the past when I had forgotten how to do something. So I was a year or two behind the curve on AI assisted programming. What I found, when I got up to date, was shocking.

I haven’t coded for Android in a few years but I was so irritated by recent experiences with banking OTPs (One Time Passcodes) that I decided to write a little app that would give me convenient and virtually global access to SMS texts. A system that would work even if there were no mobile network, just a hotel Internet connection but which would also ring the landline on my desk. An app that would work with e-sims, data only sims and real sims. That would work on the Serengeti mobile network or on a subway WiFi Internet. An OTP receiver that I could read or hear in most places, even if I had lost my phone and only had an old laptop.

I set up ‘Android Studio’ and started ‘kotlin’ coding in the normal way then hit an impasse. Android Studio was prompting me to let it’s AI agent have a go so I set it up. I was blown away. Not only did it find and insert libraries of code that I did not know existed, it also advised me that the product we were making could never be sold on Play Store because of security considerations. However, it remarked that it was a really good idea for personal use.

The AI assistant was so good that it was almost at the stage of writing a complete application from a simple description of what I wanted. It made a couple of mistakes such as not foreseeing its creation of an endless loop in the landline system (oops, fortunately I stopped it before my account was banned); but it was good, really good.

I spent a couple of minutes thinking selfishly that software development now only needs old hands like myself who know the systems intimately but are rusty at coding. I then thought about the poor young workers in the software industry who are now no longer needed. (Jack Dorsey sacks 1000s , Microsoft sacks 1000s). They really are not needed. In the media it is often claimed that the AIs are being blamed as spin for poor company performance or to cover up for Musk’s alleged bad temper etc. but the armies of software engineers are truly not needed. The redundancies are not spin.

The need for AIs to write AIs is the reason why AI software agents such as I described above are so good at the job.

AIs are now writing the computer code to create AIs and AIs are finding the data to train AIs. AIs are advancing incredibly rapidly. What you see when you use ChatGPT or Gemini online is a software model that is already a year out of date. A year is a very long time in AI development.

My experience with landline looping (that I described above) shows that the AIs will only be truly effective when they are linked to humanoid robots. It does not matter how clever the AIs get, without hands and sensors that can move about in the world they are fundamentally limited.

My guess is that 2026-2027 marks the year at which AIs exceeded human capabilities in most spheres of intellectual endeavour. We will see this clearly in a year or two as the newer AIs are released. This does not mean that a given AI is better than a given human at all times but it does mean that it is better most of the time.

Many pundits are now saying that the ‘singularity’ will be reached before the end of the decade. As Gemini puts it: “The AI singularity is a hypothetical future point in time when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, triggering explosive, runaway technological growth that irreversibly transforms civilization.”

I think that the singularity will be reached for intellectual pursuits before 2030. However, this will only happen if humanoid robots are available by then that can pick up the phone. This is only 4 years time.

It is an odd and slightly scary feeling to be on the edge of a yawning precipice.

Even scarier, China may well beat the West to the singularity. Unfortunately our government is packing the country with Chinese electronics and encouraging AI adoption throughout industry. Labour is imagining that AIs will produce a Socialist utopia where everyone is lounging around on benefits (UBI), living in panelaks and watching AI created TV. It will actually be a National Socialist utopia because oligarchs will rule.

All bets are off, who knows what the next decade will bring?