It all starts, as these things so often do, with a handful of nerds getting unreasonably excited about something no one else understands. Let’s paint the picture.
In one corner of the internet, circa 2010, you have a loose confederation of cryptographers, anarcho-capitalists, and computer science post-docs downloading a clunky piece of software to their desktops. They’re “mining” a make-believe currency called Bitcoin, a process that involves their computer solving a pointless math problem and getting a reward that is, for all practical purposes, worthless. Their friends and family think they’re nuts. The entire global financial system, to the extent it notices them at all, lets out a condescending chuckle.
In another corner, tucked away in the server farms of university labs and corporate skunkworks, another tribe of nerds is getting equally excited about something else. They’re training neural networks, digital contraptions loosely inspired by the brain’s wiring, to do things like identify a cat in a picture. It’s a monumental effort, requiring oceans of data and computational brute force, just to achieve the cognitive prowess of a toddler. The world at large, busy with its stock markets and its elections, pays them no mind.
It’s all just academic, isn’t it?
The human brain, for all its marvels, is a notoriously poor instrument for understanding exponential change. We evolved on the savanna, where the most pressing concern was the linear approach of a lion, not the logarithmic growth of a processing curve.
Humans are local and linear thinkers in a global and exponential world. And so, we missed it. We saw these two tribes of obsessives, one tinkering with funny money and the other with cat-detectors, and we filed them away as separate, quirky curiosities. Perfectly understandable, really. We failed to see that they were pulling at two loose threads of the same cosmic sweater. We failed to realize they were building the engines for two singularities that would converge to define the 21st century and everything that comes after.
A singularity, in physics, is a point where the known laws break down: the infinitely dense heart of a black hole, the moment before the Big Bang.
A technological singularity is much the same: a point in time at which the rules of the human game change so profoundly and so rapidly that the past becomes an unreliable guide to the future. These two tribes were, and are, building just that.
The AI crowd is building a cognitive singularity, an intelligence explosion that will mark the end of the era of human thought as the dominant force on Earth. The Bitcoin crowd, meanwhile, has built a monetary singularity, a financial black hole with a fixed, immutable supply that is inexorably swallowing the world’s value. This is not a forecast. It is an observation of two runaway processes that are already well underway.
The Mind of God, Coded in Python
To understand the cognitive singularity, you first have to stop thinking about intelligence as something mystical.
It isn’t.
Intelligence is a combinatorial, problem-solving toolkit. It’s the ability to take information from the world, model its patterns, and then use that model to achieve goals. For three and a half billion years, evolution was the sole craftsman of this toolkit, working through the painfully slow, trial-and-error process of natural selection. It produced some impressive models… the bat’s sonar, the bee’s little wiggle dance communications system, but it was all narrow, specialized intelligence.
Then, in a geological blink, one species of primate stumbled upon a crucial software upgrade: general intelligence, coupled with its killer app, language. Suddenly, one toolkit could be used to solve an almost infinite variety of problems, from chipping flint to composing symphonies to splitting the atom. A single species, armed with a superior information-processing system, completely rewrote the rules of the planet in a few dozen millennia. We were the first singularity.
What the AI labs at places like DeepMind and OpenAI have been doing is taking that same principle and putting it on silicon. They’re not just building better cat-detectors. They are engineering the process of engineering itself. They are building systems that learn. And the history of their progress is a smooth upward curve that looks, to the uninitiated, like a series of sudden, shocking leaps. One minute, an AI can barely win at checkers. The next, in 2016, a program named AlphaGo built by DeepMind defeats Lee Sedol, the world’s greatest Go player, in a game whose combinatorial complexity is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. Experts had predicted that milestone was at least a decade away. They were wrong.
The reason for their error is the same reason we fail to see the singularity coming: the power of the feedback loop. AlphaGo didn’t just play Go; it learned to learn Go. It played against itself millions of times, discovering strategies that had eluded human masters for 3,000 years. This is the key. The moment an AI becomes skilled enough to improve its own intelligence, the game changes. It enters a state of recursive self-improvement. An AI that is 10% smarter than a human can design a new AI that is 20% smarter. That AI, in turn, can design one that is 50% smarter. The curve of progress goes from linear to exponential to vertical.
This is the intelligence explosion. It is humanity’s last invention.
AI Comes For Industries and Entire Business Models
Nearly all my rich friends are stressing out about the value of their companies and business efforts in a rapidly changing world. They are always on the run trading time for income and suddenly they see AI lowering the “cost of intelligence” and delivering continuously improving work.
This superintelligence will not be just another tool, like a hammer or a spreadsheet. It will be a universal problem-solver. It will develop algorithms of such staggering complexity that they will untangle the knots of protein folding that cause Alzheimer’s, design fusion reactors that provide near-limitless clean energy, and plot the physics of warp drives for interstellar travel. These are not science-fiction fantasies; they are engineering problems. And we are building an engineer of near-infinite capacity. The cognitive singularity is the moment we outsource not just our labor, but our discovery.
The Ghost in the Money Machine
While one tribe was building a new mind, the other was building a new money. And to understand how radical an achievement this is, you have to understand that money, too, is a technology.
Money is an information system. For millennia, we have searched for a perfect medium to store and exchange value. We tried seashells, then salt, then shiny metals. Gold was the best of the bunch. It was scarce, durable, and hard to counterfeit. But it had a fatal flaw: it was physical. To secure it and transact with it, you needed vaults and guards and middlemen. This created centralization, and with centralization came control. Kings could clip the coins; governments could confiscate the bullion.
So we made another technological leap, to fiat currency. The dollar, the euro, the yen. This was money as pure information, backed not by a physical commodity but by the full faith and credit of the state. This solved gold’s physicality problem, but it introduced a far more corrosive one. The supply was now controlled by a small committee of humans. And humans, bless their hearts, are susceptible to incentives. When faced with a choice between long-term fiscal prudence and the short-term political expediency of printing more money, they will choose to print every single time. The result is an invisible tax on everyone, a slow, silent bleeding of purchasing power. Your dollar today is worth less than it was yesterday, and it will be worth even less tomorrow. It is a system built on a foundation of managed decay.
Then, on Halloween of 2008, in the smoldering ruins of a global financial crisis born of this very system, a pseudonymous entity named Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page white paper to a cryptography mailing list. It was titled, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” It was the blueprint for the world’s first monetary singularity.
What Satoshi solved was a problem in computer science known as the Byzantine Generals’ Problem. How do you get a group of actors who don’t know or trust each other to agree on a single source of truth? Satoshi’s solution was a stroke of multidisciplinary genius. It combined a public ledger (the blockchain), cryptography (public/private keys), and a novel incentive system (proof-of-work). In essence, he created a way for a decentralized network of computers to maintain a perfectly immutable record of transactions, without any need for a bank, a government, or any other central authority.
The system’s most radical feature, however, was its monetary policy. The supply of Bitcoin was fixed in the code. There would only ever be 21 million coins. This wasn’t a promise; it was a mathematical certainty, enforced by a global network of computers competing for a reward. For the first time in human history, we had an asset with absolute, provable scarcity.
This is why Bitcoin is a monetary singularity.
It is a financial black hole. Its fixed supply acts as a gravitational constant. As trust in the inflationary fiat system inevitably erodes, capital, which is just stored energy, will seek a haven. It will look for a store of value that cannot be debased, that cannot be censored, and that cannot be confiscated. It will find Bitcoin. This isn’t a matter of speculation; it is a matter of game theory. The flow is inexorable. All other forms of money, from the U.S. dollar to real estate to fine art, will eventually be priced in relation to it.
This changes everything.
It flips the economic script from a culture of spending and debt to one of saving and capital accumulation.
Why spend a Bitcoin today if you know with near-certainty it will command more goods and services tomorrow? More profoundly, it fundamentally alters the relationship between the individual and the state. By holding your own private keys, you hold your wealth in a way that is unseizable. It is absolute property. It renders financial censorship impossible and shifts the balance of power decisively back to the sovereign individual.
The Great Convergence
So we have these two runaway trains, on parallel tracks, hurtling into the future. One is a mind of unimaginable power; the other is a money of absolute integrity. What happens when they meet?
The convergence is not just likely it is a logical necessity.
Ask yourself: what kind of money would a disembodied, globally distributed superintelligence choose to use?
It would need a monetary protocol that is natively digital, that operates without trust, that is secured by thermodynamic reality (aka the expenditure of energy), and whose rules are transparent and immutable. It would require a system that no human government could freeze or manipulate.
It would invent Bitcoin if it did not exist. Maybe… it did?
The fusion of these two singularities will be the most powerful catalyst for change in human history.
The AI, fueled by near-free energy and operating on a perfectly sound monetary standard, will orchestrate an economy of autonomous agents. It will manage global supply chains with perfect efficiency, design new materials atom by atom, and deploy fleets of self-replicating robots to build infrastructure, all transacting seamlessly and instantly on the Bitcoin network.
This is the end of the institutional age. For centuries, we have relied on institutions to act as trusted intermediaries. Banks, governments, corporations and universities gained untold power under this model. We trust the bank to hold our money, the government to enforce contracts, the university to certify knowledge. These institutions are all, at their core, mechanisms for managing human fallibility.
But they are slow, inefficient, and prone to corruption.
The new paradigm replaces trust in human institutions with cryptographic proof.
Why trust a politician’s pinky promise when you can have the mathematical certainty of a smart contract?
Why trust a central bank’s inflation target when you can have the absolute scarcity of Bitcoin?
The radical decentralization of power that Bitcoin began will be completed and managed by AI. Hierarchies of control will dissolve into networks of voluntary, programmatic cooperation. This is not a utopia. It is simply the next stage of complexity. It is a world of unimaginable prosperity, a world where the creative and productive capacity of civilization is unleashed from the twin shackles of limited human cognition and unsound money. It is a world where the individual is finally, truly sovereign.
The curves are bending toward vertical. The rumbling you hear in the distance is the sound of two worlds colliding: the old world of linear assumptions and centralized control, and the new world of exponential growth and decentralized truth.
It is the sound of the twin singularities.
And it will change everything.
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I started Life in the Singularity in May 2023 to track all the accelerating changes in AI/ML, robotics, quantum computing and the rest of the technologies accelerating humanity forward into the future. I’m an investor in over a dozen technology companies and I needed a canvas to unfold and examine all the acceleration and breakthroughs across science and technology.
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