{"id":99962,"date":"2025-12-28T04:00:01","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T09:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=99962"},"modified":"2025-12-27T15:03:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T20:03:50","slug":"the-singularity-is-upon-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/12\/28\/the-singularity-is-upon-us\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Singularity is upon us”"},"content":{"rendered":"

ESR<\/a> is clearly not worried about the clankers taking over, at least based on his own experience with coding assistance from AI:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Yes, I’m still 12<\/p><\/div>\n

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.<\/p>\n

And now I want to make you feel that, too.<\/p>\n

In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair.<\/p>\n

Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone. <\/p>\n

We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream. <\/p>\n

We didn’t have version control. Public forge sites wouldn’t be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.<\/p>\n

Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy.<\/p>\n

You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself.<\/p>\n

Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day. <\/p>\n

Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test … and I’m still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that!<\/p>\n

This meditation isn’t supposed to be about me, though. It’s about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I’ve lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world’s knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn’t have said “never” (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn’t have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either.<\/p>\n

We’ve come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I’ve lived through and learned was just prologue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ESR is clearly not worried about the clankers taking over, at least based on his own experience with coding assistance from AI: I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,15],"tags":[1506,109,1235,92,403],"class_list":["post-99962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-technology","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-computers","tag-esr","tag-software","tag-thesingularity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-q0i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99962"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99976,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99962\/revisions\/99976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}