Thought there will be this C.S Lewis quote at the end, fits perfectly:
"If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."
I was having these same thoughts about the decline of interest in new videogames. Like you, I was nearly obsessed with the the Gameboy Color, Gamecube, and all the rest of it--though my family wisely discouraged me from spending too much time on these things. Even now, more than two decades later, I can't really feel that bad about it. I felt genuine excitement and satisfaction with these past-times. Good times! This feeling is a lot more muted now, and it's for things that are relatively boring like reading a good essay (like this one) or winning a game of Sushi Go.
I agree that AI seems to be following the same trajectory. I never had fears that it would overtake humanity and transform the world beyond recognition. I do worry that may devastate Gen Z who are coming to rely on it to complete their education, but this is probably because I'm a teacher who cares about this kind of thing.
And yes, us Millennial parents are far less trusting of incorporating so many "smart" products and screens into our households. My kids have none of those things and are growing up far more traditionally that I did. They're innocent, curious, and creative. I recommend this for any parent even it it requires more involvement than they may be comfortable with.
They lost me at the watch, and intrusive wearable devices. Which I have referred to as my electronic leashes professionally. That said I remember the thrill of walking home late at night wearing a Walkman. Music that could travel with me anywhere.
When did this obsessive greed start?
Very apt; “Informationally obese, ready for a digital diet.”
lol. Same for me, Randy. Really interesting how much people brag about vibe coding on Claude and yet I’ve never needed or wanted anything they produced.
This is one of the MAIN things I constantly think about- if AI is so transformative and incredibly innovative can literally anyone point to a single thing anyone has made using it that didn’t fundamentally already exist in a perfectly usable form? What amazing apps or websites or art have been made with LLMs? I’m a musician and for all the talk I hear about vibe coding etc not a single new plugin or app or musical tool has been made since the widespread adoption of LLMs that has dramatically or even noticeably moved those fields along; all the best and most widely adapted tools are things that were made traditionally. The whole proposition of AI justifying it’s absurd valuation kind of requires it to be able to do things that span beyond “nifty” or “pretty helpful if you double check it”
Glorious article. You should be proud of your writing! My childhood resonated a lot while reading the beginning and I pretty much agree with your last conclusions. I've been excited by tech for a long time but not that much lately. I feels that we are not getting as much "bang for the buck" as we used to get with tech in the 2000s.
Thank you for articulating these thoughts so beautifully. I feel that at the moment it’s not popular to argue against “the singularity” using the heuristic of the technology adoption sigmoid trend. But this essay actually has a long time horizon perspective, which really helps. It’s true, life is already digitally saturated! what else could these clankers do…
Great read! My favorite was the ending and not in a rude way. I loved how you wrapped it up with: Even if that’s not true, and everything is suddenly taken away from me in an AI apocalypse, at least I’ll die with people I love, doing normal things.
I too will be content. If that is the end for my family and I. Doing normal things!
I'm an engineer and let me just say that you're absolutely right in so many ways. There's a lot I want to expand upon, though, and I ended up writing a small essay in the comment box (poor design incentives, socioeconomic constraints on new technology v. hard physical limits, etc.). Leaving this comment as a commitment to actually flesh out that piece in the near future 🫡
"A lot of them semi-religiously believe they’ll get to live forever in some abstract super-world where they never pay the cost of being weird at parties." These words <3
That diminishing-returns line is sharp. It fits the piece's hot-water idea too: once novelty fades, people stop chasing the upgrade and care more about what the tech was supposed to free them up to do.
A great, grounding read, especially when our algorithms all point to and confirm this technological absolutism. At the end of the day, it's circular, though. Retreat from the machines and you see that. The ebbs and flows of all these predicted singularities that we've conjured up over the centuries only seem so big as we pass through them. See beyond them and observe that perhaps - and I know I can't quite prove this in any way - there's something much more basic and intrinsic to humans than the tools we use to satiate our desires.
A note on "singularity". A permanent exponential (i.e. constant rate of growth) is not a singularity. To get that, you need more, you need constant acceleration of the rate of growth.
When you look at it, many many things have been exponential for long - but as a pile of sigmoids. Corrected-for-inflation GDP and compute are relevant examples. None of them are exponentials because of a single eternal mechanism of growth, but rather by virtue of the stacking of many innovations and tiny revolutions as we fumble through technological progress.
Critically, the singularity argument hinges on "self-improvement" accelerating the rate of growth, forever. The idea is that LLMs being arbitrarily scalable means every other facet of technology will get proportionally faster. But we've been doing self-improvement forever! The printing press allows other technologies to spread faster and be better used! So does the telegraph, or train transportation, or...
The key misunderstanding is that exponential (constant rate) growth is a given, and superexponential (accelerated rate, which reaches "infinity" whatever in finite time) is something to be unlocked by technologies that permeate onto other existing technologies. The fact is that new technologies improving existing technologies is the very mechanism behind exponential growth, as opposed to boring linear growth.
The question of where the growth rate limit seems to come from is a whole debate, but it should explain also while the compounding didn't happen in the past. The limits are likely more physical than anything else.
While LLMs might still bring deep changes, the signularity argument just seems like bad economics.
My take is that singularities are never actual (just as actual infinities don't exist in the universe) -- at the end of the day, there's always a hard limit imposed by something; if nothing else, at least the available energy. What we speak of as singularities (technological or otherwise) are only apparent in the horizon. Points where our current theories break down, or our ability to predict is rendered vain, like the self improving AI apotheosis Silicon Valley believes in.
I will say that I feel it was exceptionally fast to get to diminishing returns with AI for my projects. Surely it made a bunch of progress really fast but then it very quickly hit a wall where I had done everything I needed to do with it.
What came to mind was Ecclesiastics - that diatribe to ennui by Solomon: Ecclesiastes 12:3-8
in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few … the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets—before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
I am one of those techno-optimists you talk about, and I deliberately got into technology when I was younger precisely because I had Aspergers' Syndrome and struggled immensely with dealing with normal people and enjoying parties and all the mainstream social activities.
(I was also an immigrant in the country I live in, and a lot of people around me had divergent interests than me and my close family, not to mention we literally spoke different languages at the start)
Technology was simply the best way for me to gain control in my life and do things I am interested in- dive into digital worlds where I could do whatever I wanted and tailor my own experience with mods and code, have automation and technology and AI compensate for my lack of skill elsewhere, talk with people from around the world (not the same brainwashed Christian WASPs from the USA), achieve ever increasing potential of quality of life, and most importantly do it all with no accountability from the powers that be to restrain me, giving me the hope to leech off of the fruits of the labor of others (eventually robots) instead of constantly putting in the effort to "prove I matter".
I was a weirdo introvert, and technology for me was as much backlash against a world that mandated that I hit these social bars that others were clearly more fit to hit than me, as it was a realization of my goals in life. The fastest fish that swims in water will flounder when out of water, so why force the fish to crawl instead of swim (especially in a supposedly 'free' society)?
2020 was a world I felt that was tailor made for me- where instead of me being the fish out of water, it was the extroverts that had constantly tried to drag me off to social gatherings and parties and paintball fights and just made my life more hellish and stressful.
So of course these extroverts, now the fish out of water, are backlashing against an internet they never wanted to participate in, that was made for the weirdos like myself who just wanted the mainstream normies to get away from me so they wouldn't bully me to run as fast as them.
(Thankfully, the normies only really see the headline techs like ChatGPT/Claude, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and AAA gaming, and completely ignore peripheries like locally hosted Ollama/RVC/Silly Tavern instances, Stoat/Matrix, Mastodon, indie games, and Eastern anime-style games, not to mention the robust ecosystem of open-source tech and software piracy in 2026. Their techno-ignorance makes these the new frontiers for the introvert weirdos to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate).
Different strokes for different folks is a very basic feature of any system with any degree of pluralism. To accept that, though, you need to be willing to accept the risks and discomfort that diversity can bring, and I do feel that a lot of young Westerners increasingly cannot tolerate any risk and discomfort after repeated declines in their QOL.
It's funny I feel like that weirdo introvert phenotype is more the case in the early 2000s and 2010s. I grew up in the valley and in my experience this has changed significantly. Pretty much everybody in my high school who went into computer science and similar were at least fairly extroverted and outgoing
Introverts are still around but tech in general has become more extroverted when it became popular, because all of a sudden “brogrammers” entered Silicon Valley to get rich quick, displacing the naive, altruistic, individualistic introverts that just wanted to make something on their own and exercise their freedom.
Kind of like how frontier countries like Russia, America, Brazil started with introvert outcasts that wanted freedom and independence, but as they became more populated, developed, and wealthy they became filled with get rich quick competitive yuppies that built off of the backs of the pioneers.
(As an aside the prevalence of introversion in the early 2010s in the USA specifically was a backlash against the “edgy” jock culture in media in the 1990s and 2000s. Likewise, new atheists became popular at roughly the same time as a backlash against the religious Puritanism in media, and today conservative populism is becoming popular as a backlash against woke intersectional progressivism in the 2010s, which itself was a backlash against said religious Puritanism in media).
I largely agree although the old guard of SV isnt sinless either. But yeah we definitely took a turn for the worst in the last decade or 2. I’m actually hopeful that with AI and robotics we can get back to the real economy instead of infinite ponzi schemes but lets see what happens.
The law of diminishing returns has not yet been repealed.
Thought there will be this C.S Lewis quote at the end, fits perfectly:
"If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."
This quote is truly one of the most formative philosophies I abide by.
I was having these same thoughts about the decline of interest in new videogames. Like you, I was nearly obsessed with the the Gameboy Color, Gamecube, and all the rest of it--though my family wisely discouraged me from spending too much time on these things. Even now, more than two decades later, I can't really feel that bad about it. I felt genuine excitement and satisfaction with these past-times. Good times! This feeling is a lot more muted now, and it's for things that are relatively boring like reading a good essay (like this one) or winning a game of Sushi Go.
I agree that AI seems to be following the same trajectory. I never had fears that it would overtake humanity and transform the world beyond recognition. I do worry that may devastate Gen Z who are coming to rely on it to complete their education, but this is probably because I'm a teacher who cares about this kind of thing.
And yes, us Millennial parents are far less trusting of incorporating so many "smart" products and screens into our households. My kids have none of those things and are growing up far more traditionally that I did. They're innocent, curious, and creative. I recommend this for any parent even it it requires more involvement than they may be comfortable with.
This is my plan when I've kids. No screens, maybe tv once a week but mostly gonna raise them with books and the outdoors.
They lost me at the watch, and intrusive wearable devices. Which I have referred to as my electronic leashes professionally. That said I remember the thrill of walking home late at night wearing a Walkman. Music that could travel with me anywhere.
When did this obsessive greed start?
Very apt; “Informationally obese, ready for a digital diet.”
I get a lot of ads telling me that now, using AI, I can design any kind of app I can imagine.
Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but my life doesn't suffer a dearth of apps.
(Unless they're nachos)
lol. Same for me, Randy. Really interesting how much people brag about vibe coding on Claude and yet I’ve never needed or wanted anything they produced.
This is one of the MAIN things I constantly think about- if AI is so transformative and incredibly innovative can literally anyone point to a single thing anyone has made using it that didn’t fundamentally already exist in a perfectly usable form? What amazing apps or websites or art have been made with LLMs? I’m a musician and for all the talk I hear about vibe coding etc not a single new plugin or app or musical tool has been made since the widespread adoption of LLMs that has dramatically or even noticeably moved those fields along; all the best and most widely adapted tools are things that were made traditionally. The whole proposition of AI justifying it’s absurd valuation kind of requires it to be able to do things that span beyond “nifty” or “pretty helpful if you double check it”
Glorious article. You should be proud of your writing! My childhood resonated a lot while reading the beginning and I pretty much agree with your last conclusions. I've been excited by tech for a long time but not that much lately. I feels that we are not getting as much "bang for the buck" as we used to get with tech in the 2000s.
Thank you for articulating these thoughts so beautifully. I feel that at the moment it’s not popular to argue against “the singularity” using the heuristic of the technology adoption sigmoid trend. But this essay actually has a long time horizon perspective, which really helps. It’s true, life is already digitally saturated! what else could these clankers do…
Great read! My favorite was the ending and not in a rude way. I loved how you wrapped it up with: Even if that’s not true, and everything is suddenly taken away from me in an AI apocalypse, at least I’ll die with people I love, doing normal things.
I too will be content. If that is the end for my family and I. Doing normal things!
I'm an engineer and let me just say that you're absolutely right in so many ways. There's a lot I want to expand upon, though, and I ended up writing a small essay in the comment box (poor design incentives, socioeconomic constraints on new technology v. hard physical limits, etc.). Leaving this comment as a commitment to actually flesh out that piece in the near future 🫡
"A lot of them semi-religiously believe they’ll get to live forever in some abstract super-world where they never pay the cost of being weird at parties." These words <3
As a former believer, I can vouch for that characterization
That diminishing-returns line is sharp. It fits the piece's hot-water idea too: once novelty fades, people stop chasing the upgrade and care more about what the tech was supposed to free them up to do.
A great, grounding read, especially when our algorithms all point to and confirm this technological absolutism. At the end of the day, it's circular, though. Retreat from the machines and you see that. The ebbs and flows of all these predicted singularities that we've conjured up over the centuries only seem so big as we pass through them. See beyond them and observe that perhaps - and I know I can't quite prove this in any way - there's something much more basic and intrinsic to humans than the tools we use to satiate our desires.
A note on "singularity". A permanent exponential (i.e. constant rate of growth) is not a singularity. To get that, you need more, you need constant acceleration of the rate of growth.
When you look at it, many many things have been exponential for long - but as a pile of sigmoids. Corrected-for-inflation GDP and compute are relevant examples. None of them are exponentials because of a single eternal mechanism of growth, but rather by virtue of the stacking of many innovations and tiny revolutions as we fumble through technological progress.
Critically, the singularity argument hinges on "self-improvement" accelerating the rate of growth, forever. The idea is that LLMs being arbitrarily scalable means every other facet of technology will get proportionally faster. But we've been doing self-improvement forever! The printing press allows other technologies to spread faster and be better used! So does the telegraph, or train transportation, or...
The key misunderstanding is that exponential (constant rate) growth is a given, and superexponential (accelerated rate, which reaches "infinity" whatever in finite time) is something to be unlocked by technologies that permeate onto other existing technologies. The fact is that new technologies improving existing technologies is the very mechanism behind exponential growth, as opposed to boring linear growth.
The question of where the growth rate limit seems to come from is a whole debate, but it should explain also while the compounding didn't happen in the past. The limits are likely more physical than anything else.
While LLMs might still bring deep changes, the signularity argument just seems like bad economics.
My take is that singularities are never actual (just as actual infinities don't exist in the universe) -- at the end of the day, there's always a hard limit imposed by something; if nothing else, at least the available energy. What we speak of as singularities (technological or otherwise) are only apparent in the horizon. Points where our current theories break down, or our ability to predict is rendered vain, like the self improving AI apotheosis Silicon Valley believes in.
Good note, but I still think finite exponential curves are an effective subjective singularity once arbitrarily large and steep
I will say that I feel it was exceptionally fast to get to diminishing returns with AI for my projects. Surely it made a bunch of progress really fast but then it very quickly hit a wall where I had done everything I needed to do with it.
What came to mind was Ecclesiastics - that diatribe to ennui by Solomon: Ecclesiastes 12:3-8
in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few … the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets—before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
I am one of those techno-optimists you talk about, and I deliberately got into technology when I was younger precisely because I had Aspergers' Syndrome and struggled immensely with dealing with normal people and enjoying parties and all the mainstream social activities.
(I was also an immigrant in the country I live in, and a lot of people around me had divergent interests than me and my close family, not to mention we literally spoke different languages at the start)
Technology was simply the best way for me to gain control in my life and do things I am interested in- dive into digital worlds where I could do whatever I wanted and tailor my own experience with mods and code, have automation and technology and AI compensate for my lack of skill elsewhere, talk with people from around the world (not the same brainwashed Christian WASPs from the USA), achieve ever increasing potential of quality of life, and most importantly do it all with no accountability from the powers that be to restrain me, giving me the hope to leech off of the fruits of the labor of others (eventually robots) instead of constantly putting in the effort to "prove I matter".
I was a weirdo introvert, and technology for me was as much backlash against a world that mandated that I hit these social bars that others were clearly more fit to hit than me, as it was a realization of my goals in life. The fastest fish that swims in water will flounder when out of water, so why force the fish to crawl instead of swim (especially in a supposedly 'free' society)?
2020 was a world I felt that was tailor made for me- where instead of me being the fish out of water, it was the extroverts that had constantly tried to drag me off to social gatherings and parties and paintball fights and just made my life more hellish and stressful.
So of course these extroverts, now the fish out of water, are backlashing against an internet they never wanted to participate in, that was made for the weirdos like myself who just wanted the mainstream normies to get away from me so they wouldn't bully me to run as fast as them.
(Thankfully, the normies only really see the headline techs like ChatGPT/Claude, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and AAA gaming, and completely ignore peripheries like locally hosted Ollama/RVC/Silly Tavern instances, Stoat/Matrix, Mastodon, indie games, and Eastern anime-style games, not to mention the robust ecosystem of open-source tech and software piracy in 2026. Their techno-ignorance makes these the new frontiers for the introvert weirdos to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate).
Different strokes for different folks is a very basic feature of any system with any degree of pluralism. To accept that, though, you need to be willing to accept the risks and discomfort that diversity can bring, and I do feel that a lot of young Westerners increasingly cannot tolerate any risk and discomfort after repeated declines in their QOL.
It's funny I feel like that weirdo introvert phenotype is more the case in the early 2000s and 2010s. I grew up in the valley and in my experience this has changed significantly. Pretty much everybody in my high school who went into computer science and similar were at least fairly extroverted and outgoing
Introverts are still around but tech in general has become more extroverted when it became popular, because all of a sudden “brogrammers” entered Silicon Valley to get rich quick, displacing the naive, altruistic, individualistic introverts that just wanted to make something on their own and exercise their freedom.
Kind of like how frontier countries like Russia, America, Brazil started with introvert outcasts that wanted freedom and independence, but as they became more populated, developed, and wealthy they became filled with get rich quick competitive yuppies that built off of the backs of the pioneers.
(As an aside the prevalence of introversion in the early 2010s in the USA specifically was a backlash against the “edgy” jock culture in media in the 1990s and 2000s. Likewise, new atheists became popular at roughly the same time as a backlash against the religious Puritanism in media, and today conservative populism is becoming popular as a backlash against woke intersectional progressivism in the 2010s, which itself was a backlash against said religious Puritanism in media).
I largely agree although the old guard of SV isnt sinless either. But yeah we definitely took a turn for the worst in the last decade or 2. I’m actually hopeful that with AI and robotics we can get back to the real economy instead of infinite ponzi schemes but lets see what happens.
Also I dont think introversion is a virtuous quality by itself (maybe not at all?)
Virtuous is a point of view