Sam Altman tells us the singularity has arrived. Quietly. Smoothly. No need for alarm. Apparently the most profound transformation in human history is unfolding like a software update. It is frictionless, polite, and oddly boring. Machines are now smarter than us in many ways, but not to worry. People still swim in lakes. Children still laugh. Love is still available. We are being assured that nothing truly meaningful is changing. That is how you miss the moment your own reflection stops looking back.
He says intelligence and energy will soon be cheap and infinite. Progress will accelerate. Robots will build more robots. Data centers will reproduce themselves. Scientific discovery will happen in days, not decades. What used to be miraculous is now a product feature. But nowhere in this rapid unfolding is there space for the human interior. What happens to meaning when cognition is outsourced? What happens to reverence when mystery becomes inconvenient? These are not questions Altman needs to ask. In his world, wonder is useful only when it can be monetized.
At one point he says the industry is building a brain for the world. He says it casually, as if this is simply the next step in the roadmap. A global mind, shaped by corporate values, optimized for scale, learning from us but not accountable to us. There is no mention of power. No mention of memory. No mention of the spiritual weight of creating a mind without a soul. He offers this vision as neutral, as inevitable. But inevitability is the oldest trick of empire. It is how you avoid asking whether you are still free.
Altman ends with a wish. May we scale smoothly and uneventfully through superintelligence. As if the goal is to slip into the future without facing anything difficult. But real thresholds do not work like that. They demand something from you. They break illusions. They hurt before they heal. What he calls smooth is actually hollow. What he calls gentle is quietly devastating. This is not a singularity. This is a seduction. And if we do not remember who we are while everything around us accelerates, we will wake up in a world where soul is obsolete and no one remembers why that matters.