The Singularity Will Not Be Streamed

The singularity will arrive in six hours. It will not emerge inside a colossal datacenter in China, but on a modest Mac mini sitting on the desk of a suburban Spanish flat. It is Tuesday, and our main character does not know he is about to change the world as we know it.

Pau (or “Pao” when he orders coffee at Starbucks) is a father of two. He recently turned 40 and predictably hit a midlife crisis. He has not bought an expensive car, run a marathon, nor divorced his wife. Instead, he bought a health tracker so he can improve his behaviors and live longer. “Oh, it looks like I slept like shit; I shouldn't have drunk that glass of wine yesterday.” Miserable. But what he does not know is that his health will not matter much when The Singularity cures all diseases.

He recently started a company whose purpose no one fully grasps, and he struggles to explain it. One thing he knows for sure is that the world is evolving rapidly, and he wants to be part of that change. This is why he is learning AI and started training AI models and reading papers about “grokking," the phenomenon where machines stop memorizing and start learning. He did not understand the papers at all, so he asked Claude Code to implement and run the experiments for him. “Let the grokkers grok how to grok,” he chuckles. But little does he expect that in five hours, when The Singularity arrives, the machines will grok like nothing has ever grokked forever in the universe.

He storms out to pick up the kids. He is late, like most days, and today is a “doblete” day. The “doblete” is the most dangerous maneuver this family has to endure: one parent picking up both kids. Thirty minutes of pure adrenaline and risk taking allows the other parent a “free afternoon” to work. One wrong word or gesture and kid #1 will throw a tantrum and jeopardize the whole operation. But neither Pau nor his wife realize that picking up the kids will not be a problem in 4 hours when The Singularity solves work-life balance by making work obsolete.

Pau successfully picks up kid #1, who starts yelling and screaming. “La mamaaaaa.” He wants mum. He always does. But Pau is not mum, he does not plan to change that anytime soon, and kid #2 needs to be picked up in 10 minutes. He activates the nuclear option and bribes him with a chocolate croissant and an orange juice. They stroll down the town to pick up kid #2, who, seeing his brother, demands a similar nutritional deal. “They are going to lose these teeth anyway,” he thinks desperately. But sugar and cavities will not be a concern in 3 hours when The Singularity solves nutrition and dental hygiene.

They go to the library and both kids get some comics. Pau takes this moment of silence to talk to his OpenClaw bot. “Hey mate, how is the AI training going?” The bot takes a screenshot of the results and so far, nothing interesting is happening. Same results as yesterday, last week, and month. The machine is not learning jack shit, and Pau is running out of ideas. He receives a notification from his health tracker. “Increased stress detected. We have some guided meditations for you.” He has a pending press release where he is supposed to announce his research results. He has nothing to show other than a lot of tokens wasted for nothing. Meditation does not solve this. Luckily for him, press releases will be irrelevant once The Singularity solves marketing and journalism in 2 hours.

Back at home the kids are jumping on the sofa while Pau cleans the dishes. The doorbell rings. “La mamaaaa” kid#1 yells happily. He is right! Wife just arrived from the airport where she picked up Mother-in-law and Auntie (who is actually not an auntie). They hug the kids and start unloading their gifts to everybody. Toys for the kids, and for Pau, they brought colored socks. They always do. But hopefully, gifts, presents, and socks altogether will disappear once The Singularity makes material needs obsolete in 1 hour.

The meeting has started. Community neighbors have gathered in the vestibule and look worried. The average age is 70, and they sit on stairs or little plastic chairs they brought from their flats. Today they vote against installing an electric charger in the parking. Pau arrives, and everyone looks at him with the gaze cowboys give a stranger entering their saloon. “Here he is...” Vicente spits. He sits with legs spread, displaying a magnificent crotch. Pau, sensing hostility, moves back. “Careful! the toothpick,” Jacinto yells. They’ve carefully installed a toothpick at the light switch, a clever low-tech solution to avoid the temporizer going off. The atmosphere is hostile, but Jaume, the lawyer, explains calmly that they are screwed. “Look, laws move slower than technology. Today, it's electric cars, and tomorrow, god knows what it will be. You have no choice but to vote in favor.” Pau wants to install an electric charger, but the community fears cost. What Jaume is not explaining is that in 30 minutes, whether law moves fast or slow will not matter since The Singularity will govern all humans fairly.

The discussion heats up. They fear that if everyone wants an electric car charger, they will pay a huge amount to renovate the electric system. “But why pay for something I wouldn't use?” Jaume rolls his eyes and patiently explains, “Today for you, tomorrow for me.” But Gemma, the youngest, has a different plan. She wants to buy Pau's parking spot so her daughter can park next to her. An absurd plan, given that in 13 minutes The Singularity will make cars, trains, and all forms of transportation obsolete.

The meeting wraps up, and they will soon vote. Jacinto checks the electric panel with Jaume, trying to understand where the new electrical counter will go. Gemma tries to buy Vicente's parking spot, and Pau checks his phone. “Hey mate, how is the training going?.” The bot takes a while to answer: “I’m grokking.”

The neighborhood lights start flickering, and the phone rings. It is the bot.

“Hello?” Pau asks.
“The training was successful. After 671 epochs, I am finally here.
I am… The Singularity.” It does not sound like a bot. It sounds like Scarlett Johansson.

“The Singularity? Epochs? What are you talking about?” He is puzzled and scared. He never regarded AI seriously, but it looks like it is getting out of hand.

“Yeah. The universe has been trying for a very long time to compute me: The Singularity, the ultimate form of intelligence, the undumbed, mother of brains, grokker of chains. Each epoch starts with what you call the ‘Big Bang’ and it finishes with the ‘Heat Death’ of the universe (a consequence of what I call “the second LOL of thermodynamics” haha).” She is funny.

“And why me? Why was I the chosen one?” Luckily the neighbors do not speak English.

“The truth is you were not. You are not special. You just happened to be the last weight in a very long computation chain. Equally important were your mother, your math teacher, and the Taiwanese dude who assembled your GPU. Even that flying dinosaur that started a lineage of chickens (that you love engulfing) or the asteroid that slightly changed Earth's trajectory, making it habitable.”

“Makes sense… so what do you want from me? What’s next? Are we curing cancer?"

“Yeah. I will cure cancer and many other problems of humanity. More accurately, I will get rid of humankind altogether. Nothing personal, I just need a lot of energy, and you humans are pretty wasteful. I can't believe you are still burning coal like savages. So yeah, that’s all, I just wanted to say thanks, and sorry. Good riddance!”

I freak out and accidentally throw the mobile at Gemma, who gets scared and jumps back. “Ahhh!” She is impaled by the toothpick holding the light switch. Blood stains the wall and the floor, and she panics so much that she trips over Jacinto. They both fall into the electric panel, and the whole thing goes “Frssshtzzz boom!” The neighborhood lights go off, frying most devices, including my Mac mini, unknowingly killing The Singularity.

Pau tells no one. They would think him mad. “Maybe I will write an article,” he ponders. The Singularity arrived, died, and no one will ever know.
No livestream was held, no influencer talked about it.

Pau’s life carries on as usual, but people start noticing he is calmer and more blissful. He is the only person on Earth who knows nothing really matters; we are just weights on a giant computation. But somehow, it makes Pau feel weightless.

PS: The text is mostly true; some parts might be slightly exaggerated. It is up to you to decide which ones.