The Race to the Singularity

In the coming decades, humanity will achieve feats that our ancestors didn’t even dare to dream of. This isn’t new: We created machines that play Go better than humans, stepped foot on the moon, and decoded the human genome. However, when zooming out and looking at what’s to come, these accomplishments seem like just the beginning. Technological progress is accelerating at an exponential rate, and our generation might be the first to experience what some refer to as the “Technological Singularity”.

But what does that actually mean to us, the human race? What will our lives look like? How will society change? And, arguably most importantly, by whom will these changes be shaped?

If we play this correctly, we might be able to shape the future of our species for the better – for generations to come. We might finally be able to solve many of the big problems that have plagued humanity since its inception, prevent our species from going extinct, and potentially set us on a path up the Kardashev scale.

If we fail, we might do nothing more than hasten our own demise, and wonder what could have been.

Where We Are

Say you were to find a time machine on your grandfather’s attic and decide to travel back to the year 1800 shortly after Napoleon Bonaparte seized power. You look around and realize life was completely different back then: No combustion engine-powered metal boxes on wheels driving down the roads, no buttons that can illuminate whole rooms, and no canned artificial food that can still be eaten a decade later. A person who lived in the year 1800 certainly lived a completely different kind of life than what our modern lives today look like.

Now, you realize you haven’t had quite enough of this time traveling stuff and decide to travel back another 200 years to the year 1600. Again, you look around – and realize not much has changed. Of course, you’d need to make some adjustments to your world map, and talking to people about their world view and philosophies would likely be a lot different than in the 1800s. But purely looking at technological advancements, you may be wondering if your time machine is broken. You see, while the difference in time may be the same, the difference in technological advancement is certainly not. To see a similar decline in technological advancement as you did between 2024 and 1800, you’d have to travel back about 12,000 years to the Neolithic Revolution when humans decided to settle down and cultivate fields for the first time in history.

In the past two centuries, humankind has advanced at a rate that’s never been seen before. And in the next few decades, technological progress will likely accelerate even more rapidly. For the first time in human history, one generation will be able to witness multiple technological revolutions in their own lifetime. If you were to lay out technological advancement since the beginning of human history on a timeline, we would stand right between a slowly ascending but mostly flat line and a steep, seemingly never-ending incline.

Geopolitical Shifts

Right now, we’re at a point of huge geopolitical shifts. For more than 30 years, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was the only remaining superpower. For the past couple of years, however, China has been closing the gap. Not necessarily through military conflict or political maneuvering, but through technology. If you think the future of AI is in the Silicon Valley, you might want to think again.

For more than a decade, China has been the world’s leading country in terms of AI patents and publications. In the past couple of years, China has been closing the gap to the Silicon Valley in terms of foundational model releases, and unhindered, it’s only a matter of time until they surpass the US in this area as well. China has been operating under the public radar for a long time, but it’s getting harder to ignore them. If we are not careful, a Xi Jinping-shaped singularity might be just around the corner.

However, research and development is only one part of China’s equation for the future. Chips are another big piece of the puzzle. China has recently been tightening its grip on the Taiwanese island, with tensions rising. This is not simply due to nationalistic sentiment, but because the future of AI is quite literally manufactured in Taiwan. Nvidia, Google, AMD and many other AI companies rely on the advanced semiconductor manufacturing capabilities of TSMC.

And even if Taiwan manages to prevail, China’s SMIC has recently demonstrated their ability to manufacture 7 nm chips. And chances are, they’ll be able to make them at scale in a few years. While the US is still very dependent on East Asia for semiconductor manufacturing, China is moving up the value chain with multiple backup plans.

No matter how these events will turn out, one thing is for sure: The AI arms race will not only stir up the tech sector, but it will also have a huge impact on geopolitics, changing the world’s power balance as we know it.

The Renaissance of Intelligence

While many people still think that AI (or more precisely, large language models) is “just predicting the next word” or even dismiss it as “nothing more than a big database”, the truth is that we are likely on the brink of something much bigger. While there’s still significant debate about timelines and definitions, many industry experts predict that “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) could be achieved within this decade. If we do achieve it, there will be no going back. AGI would be able to conduct AI research on its own, potentially improving itself, becoming more capable and more efficient, without any human intervention. Some researchers believe that sufficiently advanced AI systems could eventually reach superhuman capabilities in many domains.

In the coming decades, AI could help humans address disease, expand into space, and make breakthroughs in fundamental science. This isn’t easy to grasp, even as I’m writing this. Our human brains aren’t designed to comprehend the levels of capability we’re discussing. When you and I think about someone being “smart”, we might think about an IQ of 130 or so. While the IQ scale can’t simply be extrapolated to superhuman machines, it’s still a useful benchmark. How do we grasp what a machine that’s significantly more intelligent than our smartest thinkers could achieve?

The only thing we do know is that intelligence has often directly translated into power. When the homo sapiens prevailed over the homo neanderthalensis and other species 40,000 years ago, it was not because of sheer luck. Our growing, more complex brain allowed us to develop tools and strategic thinking, which in turn allowed us to quite literally take over the world.

So, what will such a machine be capable of? While we can only speculate for now, we can say two things with certainty: It could help us solve some of our most pressing problems, and it could eradicate us from the face of the Earth. By all means, it could become what we consider an omnipotent God.