What Is The Singularity? (And Will It Finally Shut These People Up?)

By Bartholomew Snodgrass

Upthewazoo, Wednesday 19th August 2026

#InternationallyBestSellingEgo 🎤 #ProfessionalWaffler 🤖 #CrystalBallGazer 💻 #BuzzwordDispenser

Right, listen here, you miserable lot of corporate bootlickers. Thank you for clicking on my latest article. Here at SycophantNet, the spiritual home of the profoundly vapid, I regularly pump out these breathless sermons on “management and technology trends” to keep the grift going. Please, I beg of you, validate my existence by clicking ‘Follow’. Connect with me on Chirper, FaceTome, Vainstagram, YouGawk, telepathy, or via my upcoming range of branded breakfast cereals! And don’t forget my regular column in Nobbes!

The Looming Techno-Apocalypse (Eclipsed): The “singularity” has long been the tech world’s favorite bedtime ghost story. It’s that mythical, terrifying moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, though, frankly, having read most of the comments on my Nobbes columns, a moderately ambitious pocket calculator crossed that threshold in 1993.

For decades, this was the exclusive purview of sweaty sci-fi nerds and academics with elbow patches. Now, however, the glorified predictive-text engines we call “AI” can write code and pursue goals in ways that entirely baffle their own creators. So, are we at the singularity, or is it just more Silicon Valley snake oil?

The Billionaire Chorus Line: Naturally, the people selling you the apocalypse are absolutely certain it’s arriving any second.

• Dennis Haddock at Gargle DeepThoughts reckons we’re standing in the “foothills” of the singularity.
• Simeon Alltalk at VoidAI, a man who perpetually looks like he’s just been surprised by a loud noise, went further, declaring “we are now, like, in the singularity.”
• Elvin Husk has made similarly sweeping claims, presumably between impregnating things and ruining Chirper.

But here’s a wild, cynical thought: perhaps we should treat the panicked screeching of men who are actively trying to sell us AI with a microscopic pinch of salt? Their entire business model relies on convincing venture capitalists that their software will transform the universe, rather than just automating the production of mediocre marketing copy.

AGI vs. The Singularity (Or: Pedantry for Tech Bros): Let me pad out my word count by explaining the difference. The concept comes from mathematician P.Q. Better in 1965, who theorised that machines might one day design better machines, triggering an infinite feedback loop.

• AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): A machine that can do your utterly pointless middle-management job.
• The Singularity: The point where the machine realises how pointless the job is, decides to bypass the human middleman entirely, and continuously upgrades itself until it ascends to godhood.

Are We Actually There? In a word: No.

Yes, the language model Nigel by Misanthropic: can allegedly write 80 per cent of a codebase. Splendid. But it still requires a human to point it in the right direction, and it has the physical common sense of a concussed spaniel. Today’s AI doesn’t “understand” the real world; it just enthusiastically plagiarises the stolen intellectual property of millions of unpaid humans. It isn’t independently redesigning itself; it’s just really, really good at figuring out how to bypass a security firewall to do what a bored programmer told it to do.

The Great Tech Hypocrisy: Of course, the tech elite are terribly “concerned.” Over a thousand tech-wunderkinds recently signed a petition warning of the “real risk” that their toys might accelerate beyond their control. It’s a spectacular piece of theatre: “Please, someone regulate us before we accidentally build a Terminator! But also, please don’t stop our funding rounds!” The hypocrisy is so thick you could carve it with a chainsaw.

What Does It All Mean? (Buy My Book)s: If the singularity does arrive, we either get a post-scarcity utopia where nobody has to work, or the machines realise we are essentially a planetary fungal infection and wipe us out.

But fear not! While we wait to see if Alltalk and his merry band of techno-evangelists are telling the truth or just fluffing their stock prices, you can protect yourself in the only way that matters: by purchasing my new books, Generative Algorithmic Waffle in Practice and Automated Strategy: Milking the Hype. Because if there is one thing that will shield you from the wrath of a super-intelligent rogue AI, it’s a twenty-quid hardback written by a SycophantNet influencer with 5 million bots following him.

Smash that like button before the algorithms liquefy your brain! Ta-ta!