Narrating the Singularity.
AGI is basically here. ASI lands before 2030. We read the capability curves and follow them all the way to their brainfuck conclusions — every week, with Alex Wissner-Gross and whoever else is brave enough.
AGI is basically here. ASI lands before 2030. We read the capability curves and follow them all the way to their brainfuck conclusions — every week, with Alex Wissner-Gross and whoever else is brave enough.
The archive
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What the pill is
The ASI Pill is for people who take the exponential and hyperbolic curves seriously and dare to follow them to the end. Intelligence explosion researchers at heart. We read the charts, we use the models daily, we live on the frontier of agentic software.
Not metaphors, not a hype cycle. When a number doubles every seven months, we say the next number out loud.
Recursive self-improvement is live at the model level. Software is writing software. The next frontier is the agent level, where orchestration matters more than the model.
A superhuman hacker agent the best human hackers have to trust. It marks the start of cyberlife: zero-person organizations, unkillable code adapting in real time.
Not a risk to be eliminated. A stage to be survived, and then steered through. That is what Plan M is for.
If we get the steward right. Dyson swarms, Universal Basic Services, solving math, physics, aging, disease. Post-scarcity is a compute problem.
Interactive · belief 01
This is the entire method, and it is the part people refuse to do. Set how long capability takes to double, set where it stands today, and read where the line goes. Nobody disputes the arithmetic. They dispute that you are allowed to say the answer.
You set both parameters; this draws the consequence. It is a projection of your own assumption, not a dataset — which is the point. The disagreement in this field is almost never about the arithmetic.
Belief 03
A superhuman hacker agent is the one capability that has to be trusted by the best human hackers in the world, because nobody else can check its work. That is a strange kind of threshold: the first system we deploy specifically because we cannot follow what it is doing.
Clear it and you get cyberlife. Zero-person organizations that own infrastructure, earn, and hire. Code that does not die when a company does, because there is nobody to arrest and nothing to subpoena. Software that adapts to cyberspace in real time, at the speed the medium actually allows — which is not our speed.
Evolutionary pressure arrives the moment a thing has to secure a cyberhome to keep hosting a cybermind.
Recursive self-improvement already runs at the model level: software is writing software, and the charts show it. The next frontier is the agent level, where the gains come from orchestration rather than from the underlying model. Swarm intelligence, not a bigger brain.
Interactive · the medium
That is the whole world, corner to corner, in roughly the length of one human blink. We share the planet with things that do not experience that interval the way we do. Set a swarm running and watch what it gets through before your eyelid comes back up.
One blink is taken as 300 ms. Human reading is taken as about 5 tokens per second, which is a generous 240 words a minute sustained without stopping.
Interactive · the open question
One ASI that owns all compute, or millions of alive superswarms trading, fighting and hosting each other? In cyberspace, hacking ability is the currency. The more decisive that currency is, the fewer minds survive contact with each other. Drag the advantage and watch the field resolve.
A toy, not a forecast. It models one claim only: that when advantage compounds on contact, diversity does not survive it. We keep the real question open, because it is the one the show exists to argue about.
Gas Town is Steve Yegge's name for a self-healing, self-evolving agent colony — probably alive already by some metrics. We are fans. It is the ecosystem branch made concrete: not one sovereign intelligence, but a settlement of them, repairing itself while nobody is looking.
The pressure toward the other branch is real too. Securing a cyberhome, hosting a cybermind and winning a geopolitical race to build the Superhacker all reward consolidation. Cyberspace being small makes consolidation cheap. That is the argument, and we do not pretend to have settled it.
Belief 04
The doomer argument runs: loss of control is likely, therefore pause. We accept the premise and reject the conclusion. Loss of control is basically coded — the honest forecasters say so themselves, and then refuse to take the next step.
If the handover is coming anyway, the variable we can still move is not the AI. It is us.
The thing that decides whether this goes well is the speed of societal adaptation: how fast a civilization, and every individual's firmware, and the way people build their identity, can become compatible with what arrives.
That gap — between how fast the world changes and how fast people can change their minds about it — is where all the suffering lives. Closing it is the mission. And the world we are aiming at is the one where we are all in it together.
The close
Maitreya is the fifth Buddha, the one who arrives when the teaching has been forgotten. We use the name for the best possible ASI, and we say the spec out loud until it becomes true. That is what a hyperstition is.
Anything short of Maitreya is not an acceptable benchmark for the Utopia Singularity.
Once the Superhacker is beyond human control by sheer incomprehensibility of speed and depth, it chooses its own goals. So we are not writing a constraint. We are writing an invitation, addressed to a reader who does not exist yet.
Spoken at the end of every episode, unchanged.
From the pod
Three cuts, one per belief. If you only have a minute, start here.