When Everything Spaghettifies
Could ideological polarization, gender divides, and wealth disparity signal that the singularity is near?
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The challenge that artificial intelligence presents is not only that our machines may outsmart us but that they may give rise to a “technological singularity.” The singularity would be a point in time where the advancement of technology becomes impossible to reverse, predict, or control. It parallels another singularity found in nature: black holes. Like a black hole, the closer we inch to the event horizon, the “weirder” things become. Could this era of rising wealth disparity, growing gender divides, and “alternative facts,” be signs that we are approaching an “event horizon?”
Stars die when their fusion activity can no longer counteract their gravity. If a star is massive enough, it collapses in on itself with such force that its protons and electrons merge into pure neutrons….creating an unfathomably dense “neutron star.” A neutron star is so dense, in fact, a single tablespoon would weigh more than 1 billion tons. In some cases, however, stars collapse into something even more dense than a neutron star: a black hole. A black hole’s gravity bends the very fabric of space itself, creating a single point, a singularity, with an immensely powerful gravitational force.
This gravitational singularity makes for some very odd properties. Certainly, any beings made of physical matter would be killed long before they could reach the “center,” but if one were able to survive a trip past the “event horizon,” only one thing is certain; there is no coming back. As you enter the black hole, its immense gravitational pull would appear to bend time itself; you would witness the movement of surrounding stars accelerate until they streaked across the sky. In a sense, time dilation would allow you to witness the “future” of the universe. Then it would get weirder, light from the universe would become increasingly bent such that your field of vision became narrower and narrower. You would eventually see the back of your own head as the light bent around you. As this happens, the gravity differential between your feet and your head becomes increasingly pronounced, pulling and stretching your body into an elongated “noodle,” a phenomenon that scientists amusingly call “spaghettification.” What happens at or beyond the “center” of the black hole is anyone’s guess. Because nothing, not even light, can escape, we cannot see or detect what occurs within a black hole or on the other side of it.
We previously discussed how AI technology could give rise to AGI and then ASI in relatively short order. From there, it may not take long to reach a kind of “technological singularity.” Like a black hole, we cannot imagine or predict what may lie on the other side of this singularity. Also, like its natural counterpart, we could find that as we edge closer to the metaphorical “event horizon” everyday observations become increasingly "strange." For example, the closer we get to the singularity, the more that time may begin to feel as if it is moving faster. Many people today already report feeling this way, likely because the pace of technological and social change around us has accelerated. Some believe that AI will further speed this growth, bringing about “explosive” GDP growth rates of 20-30 percent per year.
However, in The limits to (Explosive) Growth,
explains that such growth rates are not likely to be attained, at least not for long. Indeed, we cannot solve cancer, urbanize our people, or teach them to read twice, the benefits of many elements of progress are singular occurrences. At some point, the low-hanging fruit gets picked. More importantly, it is not clear that our social institutions could survive that pace of change. While China presents a case for a nation that sustained 10% average growth for 30 years, it did so from a low base. As Hammond states:A human can survive a car accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds, but accelerating from 60 to 600 mph in 4 seconds is enough to be deadly
But such growth rates aren’t completely off of the table, either. As pointed out by
, the ~3 percent global growth rate we have come to expect is still 100 times faster than it was throughout most of human history. Despite that acceleration, society hasn’t collapsed. On the contrary, humanity has largely prospered. This is because we humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to change. Explosive growth rates of 30 percent would simply mark a continuation of an acceleration trend that has been ongoing throughout human history. As we can see in the chart below, from the invention of agriculture through the information revolution, the time required to double the total global GDP steadily declined.
But wait a moment, sharp-eyed readers will likely object to this interpretation by focusing on the bottom right of the graph, which appears to illustrate a plateau in GDP acceleration. After the 1960s, economic growth and progress continued, but the rate has been more or less constant, no longer accelerating. This plateau was noted by Scott Alexandar at
, who even suggested this as evidence that the singularity was “canceled” in the 1960s. I have also talked a bit about this marked slowdown in progress as well, and have suggested several potential causes.However, I would caution into reading too much into the above data. We must not forget that the chart measures GDP, an inherently imperfect index that becomes more flawed as our technology progresses. As I have discussed ad nauseam before, GDP was a fairly good index for measuring industrial growth. It isn’t difficult to measure the sales of cars, pencils, or other tangible products. But as our economies dematerialize and growth shifts from atoms to bits, GDP fails to fully capture this new digital bounty of (often free) information and media, even though they clearly have value. It certainly will fail to fully capture the value of AI-generated songs, videos, and writings.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising then that growth rates appear to have plateaued in the 1960s, at the very moment when the shift from atoms to bits began. Instead of evidence of stagnation or that the singularity is “canceled,” it may be evidence that we are, in fact, nearing the event horizon and the methods and tools we use to measure progress are becoming less reliable.
Spaghettification
In addition, as Erik Brynjolfsson and
describe in their book, The Second Machine Age, the information revolution has brought an immense increase in both the “bounty” and the “spread” of this bounty. As I have noted in prior essays, we are wealthier than ever before (the bounty), but almost as a mathematical consequence of growth, the distribution of this wealth, or the spread, has become more and more unequal. Brynjolfsson and McAfee write that we appear to be transitioning from a world that follows a “normal distribution,” your typical bell curve, to one of power law distributions. In this new realm, we all still benefit from progress and growth, but some benefit far more than others.
In this world, the average pulls ahead of the median, and the gulf between 1st and 2nd place widens. Star comedians, influencers, and celebrities can use the fruits of the IT revolution to dramatically increase their reach: it simply benefits them more than it does the common people. As
has noted, while the internet has enabled more people to become published authors, 90 percent of books sell fewer than 2000 copies and 50 percent sell fewer than a dozen! For the most part, bestsellers are limited to works by celebrities and politicians; those individuals who were already known to the public. By the same token, the vast majority of app developers earn next to nothing from their creations, but a select few become extremely successful.The spread, the difference between the star performers and everyone else, is becoming more elongated. This effect is not limited to authors or celebrities. The stock market, for example, is increasingly driven by a small number of mega-corporations. As of 2024, for example, the “Magnificent Seven” (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla) comprise a rising share of total market capitalization. To be fair market concentrations have reached similar, though not as significant, levels before. This time, however, it also just so happens that the tech industry, the industry leading the charge into the singularity, is benefitting the most from the “spread.”
Could these be signs that we are witnessing the “spaghettification” of everything; where the forces of change and progress pull differently on the “top” vs the “bottom,” elongating variations in wealth, power, and influence? The concern here, for myself at least, is less about economic inequality than the potential impact this growing inequality may have on social and political institutions. Outperformers, vastly wealthier and more influential than their counterparts, could use that influence to bend those institutions in their favor, to the detriment of everyone else. This is, as we have discussed before, damaging, if not fatal, to long-term progress.
Elongation and spaghettification aren’t limited to economics either; anecdotally, it feels to many that the very social fabric that ties us together may be beginning to fray. A global gender divide, for example, appears to be emerging, where young men are increasingly conservative and young women more and more progressive. Indeed, some have suggested that the cleavage of social ideology along gender lines might be one cause of falling global fertility. Among the most gender-polarized nations is Korea, where marriage and birth rates have plummeted to some of the lowest numbers in recorded history.
This could be exacerbated by the fact that, in the US at least, political polarization, the gulf between “right” and “left,” has grown. Since the 1960s, the start of the IT revolution, the ideological spread between both camps has reached a fever pitch likely unseen since the Civil War. Many believe, as do I, that this trend is partially driven by the emergence of partisan media sources in the 1990s that aimed to appeal to group confirmation biases. Today, computer algorithms direct a steady stream of whatever “alternative facts” we would prefer to believe directly onto our phones, 24 hours a day, every day, in perpetuity. Both trends are driven and enabled by the technology revolution that began in the 1960s.
As we slip closer to this potential “event horizon,” a new world of generative AI will go further, producing movies, TV series, and other media tailored to our individual preferences. In doing so, AI threatens to undermine what remains of our shared world. As a species, it already feels that although we occupy the same physical space, many people today inhabit starkly different realities. What happens when ideologically divided people can no longer share a love for a common TV series, movie, or football team? Can our society survive when we can no longer see where personal preferences and opinions end and where a shared reality begins? Could the “gravitational pull” of this technological singularity tear our society apart before we reach it?
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The divide between the elite and the underclass is reflective of contemporary social values.
On one hand the elite are lauded for their wealth or talent or both.
On the other left wing neo-Protestants have resurrected the medieval practice of poverty worship.
This leaves out the middle class, whose unique historical emergence has prevented the fracturing of the social world into haves and have nots.
Only when there's a healthy respect for the middle class will we stop accelerating toward such a divide.
"In doing so, AI threatens to undermine what remains of our shared world." - this is an interesting potential outcome. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities argued that the key source for 'nationalism' (which manifested itself with the independence of colonies) was due to the shared world - i.e. reading the same newspapers, similar novels and going through similar experiences. If these disappear, it might have other important ramifications for our 'imagined community'.