Surfing The Singularity
It's not just you, it IS really intense.
We are at a time of intense change in many areas.
I am fairly good at tolerating ambiguity, but it’s wearing on me.
As I write this, just after lunch on the 3rd of December, I’ve had multiple encounters with others wherein I’ve been able to share a bit of prior experience. These were nothing profound - how to deal with wonky iDRAC cards in Dell servers, how to make Tailscale behave for guest access, why Plunging Into Perplexity is a good idea for qualitative researchers.
And it’s left me in the mood to write about coping with change.
Climate:
This was my motivating issue, the first cause that got me moving all those years ago. The last several days it has kept me pinned down - these were the particulate levels here in the early morning hours. I went to get a fresh shot for this article and was amazed to find that the winds have shifted, restoring our typical near perfect air.
But in the big picture, wildfire smoke is anxiety inducing, and most of the country is dealing with it. This is part of why things are so tense.
Maybe you need a HEPA filter for your home and office? They don’t cost a lot and you might be pleasantly surprised.
Politics:
I am not going to touch the minutia of the United States in 2025. Instead I will point out Imperial Alliance Networks, which I wrote almost thirteen years ago. I revisited it here in Change Partners, a little over two years ago. Basically, we are in a condition where alliances are shifting, and once things settle, we’re going to have our third industrial scale slaughter in just a bit more than a century.
This if from an article three months ago in the Washington Post - a graph of the fault lines in the Republican party. Since then Charlie Kirk has been assassinated, Laura Loomer has gotten even crazier, and Marjorie Taylor Green is making a play to lead a significant portion of the MAGA cult into the 2028 election. I no longer focus on this stuff like I once did, but this was just too big to not spend some time drawing it.
If I were going to spend additional time on this, I would focus on Loomer’s conflicts. The minute Trump is down, those red arrows are all going to reverse.
Similar exercises HAVE been happening with regard to international affairs, in particular the changes around aerospace. This is not something I’ve ever monetized, there’s just a chat room full of acquisition watchers. As I demonstrated in Constellation Cancellation, I’m more likely to be paying attention to navy gear, but ships, both in acquisition and operation, are large and slow, compared to the fighter realm.
When things are too confusing, graphs and timelines are your friend. Even if you can’t change things, you’ll feel less powerless if you can predict them in advance.
Artificial Intelligence:
This was about two weeks ago, Nate B. Jones did a briefing on AI Eats The World - a Benedict Evans presentation at Singapore’s SuperAI 2025. The best, most comforting bit in here is the discussion on the fact that innovation does not dissolve the prior layer, it builds atop it.
Alien Intelligence:
One of the things that really got me is at the six minute mark in Nate’s video. I think the quote is based on Andrej Karpathys’s Animals vs. Ghosts post.
We need to be able to imagine LLMs as non-animal alien intelligences.
Go into your bathroom, look right at yourself in the mirror, and say that line. This is not some Facebook page hawking healing crystals, this is an AI strategy influencer with 98k subscribers talking about one of the leading thinkers in the field.
But what does that even MEAN?
We are at a number of inflection points, it’s William Gibson’s concept of The Jackpot come to life. Gibson has always been able to clearly see the day after tomorrow, if you’re not a cyberpunk reader, The Peripheral offers eight thought provoking episodes.
The second book in that trilogy is Agency, which very much has to do with the notion of a rising non-human intelligence.
We don’t KNOW what it all means and we won’t for a while. Those of us who read science fiction in general, and cyberpunk in particular, have long been exposed to the thought experiments of authors in this area. This offers … it’s a vast space … but it’s not utterly unbounded. So I think that such reading provides a leg up.
A short list of viewing that has contributed to my understanding of things includes:
And strangely, Electric Dreams, an anthology based on Phillip K. Dick’s work, has gone missing from Amazon Prime.
Conclusion:
I’ve been using waves and surfing metaphors for a while, but even Nazaré is insufficient to represent today’s onslaught. The vibe of the wave scene from Interstellar seems more fitting.
So you don’t really feel any better after reading that, but you’ve got some escapist entertainment suggestions that’ll offer new perspectives.