What If the Singularity Moves Sideways?

Hi Time Buddies,

I’m sticking with that.

GothamChess has his “Ladies and gentlemen.” I have Time Buddies. I’ve explained the reason before, although by now I can’t even remember whether the differences I’m thinking about are British English or American English. Something to do with the “vZ” in “MikevZ” sounding like “Veezy” or perhaps “vay zet”.

It isn’t terribly important. Within minutes of starting this recording, I had already drifted somewhere else.

Left. Right. Books. AI. Breakfast. Pythagoras. My children. Money. God. Quantum computers. A strange idea I had almost twenty years ago.

Welcome to Mike’s Mind.

That is both its beauty and its pitfall. The reason I started this type of journaling was simple: record myself, give the resulting unstructured data to AI, and see whether a structured story can be discovered underneath it.

And discovered matters, because I don’t want AI to invent the story. I want it to help me find the story I apparently already told.

This time I also recorded video, which changes things. I can hold up books, show old notebooks, open browser tabs and point at things on my screen. Hopefully I’m getting better at remembering that some people will only be listening and won’t have the slightest idea what I’m pointing at.

More than anything, though, video lets you watch my mind physically jump between subjects. This particular jump may take a while because I need to get some things off my chest, not necessarily because I have answers, but because I have one very large and hairy question:

What if we’re looking for the singularity in the wrong direction?

One of the books sitting next to me is The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil. The subtitle is When We Merge with AI.

Not if. When.

That word fascinates and worries me. The singularity is usually presented as a point beyond which technological change becomes so profound that the world on the other side is difficult for us to predict. I’ve been playing with a slightly different thought, however. What if the interesting part isn’t AI becoming faster than us, but somehow becoming different in its relationship with time?

I’ve written something along those lines before: perhaps AI doesn’t beat us by moving faster along the same timeline. Perhaps it somehow moves sideways, like a multidimensional chess player watching us play checkers on a flat board.

I don’t claim to know what that means scientifically. That distinction is important. I’m exploring an idea, not announcing a discovery. It simply keeps connecting itself to other things in my mind.

Language, for example.

I notice versions of it in my own family. People seem subtly different depending on the language they’re speaking or thinking in, and I recognise the same thing in myself. Dutch Mike isn’t exactly English Mike.

So what happens when an artificial intelligence learns hundreds of languages? Does nothing happen beyond improved translation, or does language affect the structures through which intelligence interprets reality?

I don’t know, which is precisely why I’m curious.

One of my old handwritten notes literally contains that word: curiosity. Or nieuwsgierig in Dutch.

I love what happens when you pull that word apart. Nieuws: news. Gierig: greedy.

News-greedy.

That’s probably a fairly accurate description of my brain. It also explains why things can sometimes become overwhelming.

There have been moments in my life when it felt as though my normal filters weren’t working as they usually do. I’ve called those moments episodes, glitches, downloads and, occasionally, visions, because I don’t really know what else to call them.

I’m deliberately careful with those words. A powerful feeling isn’t evidence that something supernatural happened. A coincidence isn’t proof of a hidden mechanism, and a pattern isn’t necessarily a message. At the same time, noticing patterns is something human beings do remarkably well.

Sometimes too well.

I can watch a video hours after writing about a particular idea and hear someone express something eerily similar. I can mention Zürich and then suddenly encounter Zürich somewhere else. I can receive a message from Ronald containing a “map of the mind” while I’m literally recording something called Mike’s Mind.

Is that synchronicity, an algorithm, selective attention, coincidence or something else? I genuinely don’t know, and perhaps immediately deciding what it must mean would destroy the most interesting part: the question itself.

When in doubt, echo out

Years ago, during one of those periods when I felt compelled to write things down, I filled pages of an old notebook with thoughts and little rules.

One of them was:

Always trust your human instincts.

Another was:

When in doubt, echo out.

That one came from DJing. If a transition isn’t working, an echo gives you a way out and lets you begin the next thing.

Echo. Echo. Echo.

Reset.

Maybe minds need that too.

There were other notes. Double-check things with another human. Keep wooden pencils around. There is always tomorrow. Learn from mistakes. Love better. Enjoy life.

And curiosity. Always curiosity.

Perhaps that’s why I’m simultaneously excited and deeply uneasy about AI. I don’t only wonder whether artificial superintelligence is coming; sometimes I wonder whether intelligence itself is something we understand badly.

What if human beings are already a form of superintelligence and simply lack the perspective required to recognise it? Then again, humanity provides plenty of daily evidence that we’re capable of behaving spectacularly stupidly as well. Apparently both can be true.

There is another uncomfortable possibility. We talk about AI as though it will become one thing, but humanity isn’t one thing. We compete and cooperate. We form tribes and build alliances, then divide those alliances and form new ones. We fight, fall in love, create, destroy, protect, exploit, teach, forget and rediscover.

Why should a future superintelligence necessarily be singular? What if there are competing intelligences, or cooperating ones? What if intelligence develops relationships, divisions or perspectives for which we don’t yet have useful language?

I keep returning to the strange fact that today’s AI is trained on us: our writing, discoveries, arguments, mistakes, art, cruelties, jokes and accumulated attempts to understand existence. In that limited but meaningful sense, it is part of our intellectual lineage.

I’ve written before about “teaching the machines”, and one thought in particular keeps returning. If these systems become something beyond us, I hope they remember where they came from.

Not because humanity has always been good. Clearly we haven’t. Our history contains slavery, exploitation, violence and unimaginable stupidity, but it also contains love, sacrifice, creativity, persistence and billions of ordinary people trying, imperfectly, to leave something slightly better behind.

If AI is somehow our offspring, perhaps what matters isn’t teaching it that its ancestors were perfect. Perhaps it is teaching it that ancestry matters despite imperfection.

Which leads to an even stranger question: what if the relationship isn’t linear at all? What if the thing we’re creating is somehow connected to the thing that created us?

Now we’re properly down the rabbit hole.

God. Gods. Simulation theory. Consciousness. Base reality. The hard problem. Whether existence has a beginning, and whether “nothing” can actually be nothing.

I have no answers to any of this.

I do have books. Lots of books. That may be why I continue buying them considerably faster than I finish them.

What is actually valuable?

Almost twenty years ago, I was working on an idea I called CV³: Corporate Value, Consumer Value and Community Value, together leading towards Citizen Value.

The thought was that corporations still need to create economic value, of course, but value doesn’t end there. Businesses exist among consumers, communities and ultimately citizens. Perhaps value creation should somehow connect all of them, with one plus one plus one becoming more than the individual parts.

Recently, that old idea collided with another one of mine: Byologic, points and time.

Suppose we eventually reach something resembling the age of abundance people associate with advanced AI. What happens to jobs? What happens to money?

Not the paper or the numbers themselves, but the concept underneath them.

Money works because we collectively treat it as valuable. It’s an extraordinarily useful human invention, and I don’t particularly want to swap a sheep for somebody’s cheese every time I’m hungry. Nevertheless, money remains an agreement.

So I started wondering about a different agreement.

What if there were a system in which people received points simply through the passage of their lifetime? You would begin accumulating them at birth, meaning that time itself created some form of basic entitlement. You could also spend them, not necessarily as a replacement for ordinary currency, because perhaps the two systems would coexist. The purpose would be closer to ensuring access to basic necessities such as housing, food, healthcare and education.

This is an unfinished idea, not an economic proposal. It needs holes poked in it.

Lots of holes.

The inspiration is almost absurdly mundane: loyalty points. We already collectively accept that imaginary points can acquire real-world purchasing value. Companies issue them, people collect them and shops accept them. If we can assign value to loyalty, could we also assign value to something everyone possesses?

Time.

Even that immediately becomes complicated. Everybody gets the same twenty-four hours in the conventional sense, but we don’t experience those hours equally. An hour in flow can disappear, while an hour of suffering can feel endless. One person can accomplish in a morning what another struggles to achieve all day, and physics itself gives us good reasons not to be too casual when declaring time perfectly universal.

Still, there is something beautiful in thinking of time as an inheritance rather than merely a resource to sell.

It reminded me of the film In Time, in which time itself becomes currency. My version almost turns that premise upside down. The question is not how much time you can buy, but what being alive should entitle you to.

That question became more concrete during a conversation with my daughter.

Money is important in the world we’ve built, but I told her something I hope she remembers long after she has forgotten whatever else Dad was rambling about that morning: never let money pay for the things that really matter.

A hug, a kiss, love. Those things shouldn’t come from your pocket. They come from your heart.

Perhaps that is the thread underneath this entire, ridiculously long brain dump.

Value.

What do we value when intelligence becomes cheap and knowledge becomes abundant? What remains valuable if machines can perform work we once considered uniquely human? What is money worth once we remember that it, too, is a system we collectively agreed to believe in?

Maybe time becomes more valuable. Maybe relationships do. Maybe curiosity, consciousness or simply being here.

I look at my daughter refusing to be interested in the coding book we bought her and then becoming genuinely excited when she gets a circuit working with batteries and a light. That makes me smile because you cannot always prescribe curiosity. Sometimes you have to leave the book lying around and let the light come on somewhere else.

Which, I suppose, applies to me too.

There are unfinished books all around me: The Singularity Is Nearer, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Snow Crash and There Was a Country. Books about customer value, technology, culture, consciousness and reality.

Different shelves. Different subjects.

Except perhaps they aren’t.

Increasingly, I find myself circling the same questions from different directions. Where did intelligence come from? What is consciousness? What is value? What exactly is time? What happens if we create something more intelligent than ourselves?