Sorry, Sam and Elon, we have not reached the Singularity

Remember “CEO said a thing” journalism?

A lot of CEOs just said a thing:

Don’t take them seriously.1 Partly because, well CEO’s gotta CEO2: In the modern era, making outlandish claims is practically in the job description:

I don’t even know why Sam’s singularity remark (made recently during a podcast) is even news, since Elon has been saying it all along, e.g., in January

and he more or less said it last year, too.

and as far back as 2017, longer than he has been touting fleets of Robotaxis:

Sam, as is often the case, is simply aping Elon. (And for that matter Sam himself said it a year ago, in a self-contradictory blog that never defines the term.)

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Another reason not to take the whole lot of them seriously is that, so far as I know, none of them has actually defined what they mean. So far as I know nobody other than me even bothered to ask. As Neil Turkewitz put it (replying to me):

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No matter how you slice it, we just are not actually there yet.

If we were, we wouldn’t be once again seeing what I have been calling the Klarna Effect, the AI hype two-step, in which employers boast of using AI to reduce head count only to quietly rehire humans.

But here we are:

According to the WSJ, “The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing corporate messaging during much of the AI era. Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job. But some executives say the costs and limitations of AI now demand that more people be added; others want to hire people back following layoffs.”

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And we certainly haven’t reached the age of abundance that Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk keep insisting is a natural consequence of AI.

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Nor have we reached a moment in “which technological growth accelerates beyond human control”

We can still perfectly well shut this stuff off if we want to. (It’s mainly because of greed that we don’t, stepping on the gas rather…