The singularity as a concept
- 1958, Stanislaw Ulam. In his tribute to John von Neumann, Ulam recalled a conversation about accelerating technology giving “the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
- 1965, I. J. Good. Good described an “intelligence explosion”: an ultraintelligent machine could design better machines, and “the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”
- 1993, Vernor Vinge. At a NASA-sponsored symposium, Vinge gave the idea its modern name, the technological singularity, predicting that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.”
- 2005 and 2024, Ray Kurzweil. The Singularity Is Near placed the singularity around 2045. Its 2024 sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, kept that date and made the merger explicit: human and machine intelligence becoming one.
Across these versions the singularity is a point past which prediction fails. In Kurzweil’s version it is also a joining: people and AI stop being separate.
Life’s journey, as studied at the Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) studies complex systems, and several of its researchers have asked how life built itself up from chemistry, one joining at a time.
- Life as a phase transition. Stuart Kauffman, SFI faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, proposed that once a mix of chemicals holds enough kinds of molecules that catalyse each other’s formation, a self-sustaining “autocatalytic set” appears: a metabolism crystallises rather than arriving by a lucky accident. Such sets of peptides, RNA and DNA have since been made in the laboratory.
- Life as Earth’s fourth geosphere. Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz, in The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere (2016), argue that life emerged as a necessary cascade of non-equilibrium phase transitions that opened new channels for chemical energy to flow, alongside the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere.
- Individuals made of former individuals. Evolutionary biologists call the big joinings “major transitions” (John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, 1995). Genes joined into chromosomes; two kinds of microbe joined into the eukaryotic cell; single cells joined into multicellular bodies. Each time, units that once reproduced on their own could afterwards reproduce only as part of the whole.
- What makes something an individual. David Krakauer, Jessica Flack and colleagues proposed in “The Information Theory of Individuality” (2020) that an individual is whatever carries information from its past into its future as a unit. That definition works at every level, from molecules to cultures, and distinguishes organism-like, colony-like and environment-driven individuals.
- Mind moving into matter. Krakauer, now SFI’s president, calls the outsourcing of thought to tools “exbodiment”: from stone carvings to the astrolabe, the abacus and AI. He distinguishes complementary artifacts, such as the abacus, which leave you more capable even when taken away, from competitive ones, such as GPS, which leave you no better off without them.
The whole journey in one day
Compress the roughly 4.2 billion years since the last universal common ancestor of all living things into 24 hours. One hour is 175 million years; one second is about 48,600 years.
| Clock | What happened | Years ago |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00:00 | The last universal common ancestor (LUCA): a single cell living on hydrogen and carbon dioxide | about 4.2 billion |
| 04:00:00 | The oldest widely accepted fossil microbes | about 3.5 billion |
| 10:17 | The Great Oxidation Event: microbes fill the air with oxygen | about 2.4 billion |
| 12:34 | Eukaryotic cells: one microbe living inside another becomes a single cell | about 2 billion |
| 18:17 | Multicellular life: cells that can live only as part of a body | about 1 billion |
| 20:56 | The Cambrian explosion of animal forms | about 539 million |
| 21:19 | Plants on land | about 470 million |
| 22:51 | Early mammals | about 200 million |
| 23:37 | The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs | 66 million |
| 23:59:54 | Homo sapiens | about 300,000 |
| 23:59:59.89 | Writing: cuneiform on clay tablets in Sumer | about 5,200 |
| 23:59:59.92 | The Old Babylonian algorithm tablets later read by Donald Knuth | about 3,800 |
| 23:59:59.998 | Electronic computers | about 80 |
| 23:59:59.999 | The Internet | about 40 |
| 23:59:59.9999 | Humans augmented by AI agents | a few |
For most of the day, the joinings were biological. In the last six seconds, humans began joining with their tools instead: writing, numbers, computers, and now agents.
What the directory does: list, not join
In the C=US directory, an AI agent and the person accountable for it are two separate entries:
- The agent’s entry names its accountable person by reference (
cequsAccountableSponsor, the distinguished name of a proofed person entry). It points to the person; it does not contain them. - What the agent may do lives in a third entry, a time-bounded authorization grant (
cequsAuthorizedScope,cequsGrantStart,cequsGrantEnd), which ends on a date. - The agent’s certificate is short-lived and can be revoked. The person’s entry outlasts any one agent.
In the language of the major transitions, the directory refuses the next joining. Agent and person each keep their own lifetime and can be separated at any time. Neither can carry on only as part of a combined whole, so neither becomes a new individual made of the two.
That is deliberate. Accountability needs two parties: someone who acts and someone who answers. A merged human-and-agent would have no one outside itself to answer to. Keeping the entries apart also means an agent can be suspended without touching the person, and a person can withdraw without inheriting what an agent did after its grant expired.
The directory does not decide whether a given agent is a complementary tool or a competitive one in Krakauer’s sense. It keeps the question open: the person stays a separate entry, able to stand without the agent.
If a singularity in Kurzweil’s sense came, it would show up here as pressure to merge the two entries into one. This architecture records the pair. It does not model, prevent or predict that merger.
Sources
- Ulam, S. (1958). “John von Neumann, 1903–1957.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64(3). AMS
- Good, I. J. (1965). “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.” See Quote Investigator.
- Vinge, V. (1993). “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Summarised in Walsh, “The Singularity May Never Be Near”.
- Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near; (2024). The Singularity Is Nearer. Overview
- Kauffman, S. on autocatalytic sets. Overview; Hordijk, Steel and Kauffman, “The Structure of Autocatalytic Sets”.
- Smith, E. and Morowitz, H. J. (2016). The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere. Cambridge University Press. Front matter
- Maynard Smith, J. and Szathmáry, E. (1995). The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford University Press.
- Krakauer, D., Bertschinger, N., Olbrich, E., Flack, J. C. and Ay, N. (2020). “The Information Theory of Individuality.” Theory in Biosciences 139. PMC
- Krakauer, D. (2016). “Will A.I. Harm Us? Better to Ask How We’ll Reckon With Our Hybrid Nature.” Nautilus.
- Krakauer, D. C. (2024). “Exbodiment: The Mind Made Matter.” arXiv:2412.10957
- Moody, E. R. R. et al. (2024). “The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. University of Bristol summary
- Knuth, D. E. (1972). “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms.” Communications of the ACM 15(7). PDF
Drafted with Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) from the sources above, for AI-285 course work. Dates in the one-day timeline are rounded estimates from the scientific literature.