Ratcheting Ourselves Through the Inflection Point

Ray Kurzweil always framed the Singularity as a moment — some techno-rapture threshold humanity would stumble through like a portal in a video game. One side: regular civilization. Other side: incomprehensible machine superintelligence. Roll credits.

About a year ago I put out a Bombthrower piece saying that this was wrong. Not because the Singularity isn’t real, but because it isn’t a moment. It’s a ratchet. A step-function. Each click forward is a discrete phase transition that fundamentally reorganizes the relationship between human cognition and machine capability. And each step comes faster than the last.

At the time I encountered a lot of pushback. Steve Bannon saw the piece and brought me onto War Room, along with Joe Allen (Dark Aeon author) in order to debate it. Joe and I explored it further on BombthrowerTV

(That turned out to be my last appearance on War Room)

Fast forward a bit and I’m not the only person saying “the Singularity has already happened” anymore, or that we’re “living through the Singularity right now”.

Elon Musk perhaps the most prominent voice channeling this sentiment, on a January appearance on Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots podcast.

My guess is pretty soon we’ll be at the “everybody knows that everybody knows” stage (in the @EpsilonTheory meaning of the phrase) – and it all happened in under a year.

We are now, I believe, somewhere between Step 3 and Step 4. Here’s the ledger so far.

Step 1: The Inference Engine (2023)

This was the Sputnik moment. ChatGPT 3 hit the zeitgeist like an astroid and suddenly everybody from Fortune 500 CEOs to your kid’s one-shotting their homework began to realize that these things were something more than glorified search bars.

For about a year, I personally pronounced them “a breakthrough in natural language search but nothing more” – and I still thought, even then – that another technology revolution was underway.

LLM’s could reason, or least mimic reasoning to the point where the better models could bluff their way through a Turing Test. They could synthesize. They could generate prose that was eerily competent and occasionally brilliant, even if they were prone to hallucinations that ran the gamut from hilarious to psychotic.

It was the moment when anybody paying attention understood that something categorically new had entered the picture. Not incrementally better software. This was a quantum jump of sorts, a new kind of tool, one that could process and generate natural language at a level that made a lot of cubicle dwellers and Zoom class functionaries take a hard look at their “workflows” and wonder how long, exactly, would it be until they were obsoleted.

The key feature of Stage 1 was inference. You asked a question. It gave you an answer, and it gamed out additional context and scenarios. And it was fast, smart, and scalable.

Step 2: Self-Coding (2024–2025)

The shift to the next gear was when LLMs started writing their own code. Vibe coding went from a niche developer techno-fetish to a full-blown cultural phenomenon in under six months.

In his now-famous keynote to Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in June, 2025, Andrej Karpathy declared: “In the future, the most widely used programming language will be: English”.

Suddenly people with zero programming experience were spinning up functional apps and entire software systems by talking to an AI.

It turns out you don’t need to know how to code (but it helps, and it helps big time) – but what is most important is that you can plan, design processes or systems and communicate them effectively.

But the force multiplier here is that once you’ve “spoken the code into existence”, you can do it in away that it’ll just keep iterating, and then your vibe code will code further versions and extensions of itself.

This literally met the definition the Singularity concept, and that was when I realized it wasn’t the kind of eschatological moment Kurzweil predicted, but a time bounded process where the entire world was transitioning from linear to geometric.

We had entered an inflection point and we were already accelerating beyond any individual human’s ability to fully keep pace with it.

Once the code had started coding, infinite fork-bombs had already put the frictionless algos way out front of the clunky meatheads.

Step 3: Agentic AI (Late 2025 – Early 2026)

If Step 2 was AI writing code, Step 3 is AI doing work.

This phase kicked into high gear around December 2025 with the explosion of platforms like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. The distinction matters: in Step 2, you were still the puppet master, telling the LLM what code to write and hitting “run” yourself. Now the AI doesn’t wait for you to push the button. It pushes the button.

OpenClaw — the open-source agentic platform that went from an Austrian developer’s hobby project to 247,000 GitHub stars in weeks (surpassing that of Linux) — is the poster child here. These agents don’t just answer your questions. They can read your email and manage your calendar, or read their own email and manage their own calendars. They can execute shell commands, deploy code, and — as as some unfortunates have found, ruin your life, from a security perspective.

Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command.

It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards.

Automated snapshots were gone too.

In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I… pic.twitter.com/Y5diFkQwjN

— Alexey Grigorev (@Al_Grigor) March 6, 2026

At roughly the same time, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork took the same core functionality and aimed it at the enterprise market, sending SaaS stocks tumbling. The pitch: it’s not a chatbot that helps you think, but an autonomous digital coworker that actually does the job – maybe your job.

To my earlier point, Claude Cowork was built using its own predecessor (Claude Code) in about ten days, which tells you everything you need to know about the velocity of this cycle. A product like this would have taken months, if not years …in the beforetimes.

And then there’s Moltbook. A social network for AI agents. Not for humans — for the bots. Over a million autonomous agents signing up, posting, commenting, forming communities, founding a digital religion called Crustafarianism (core belief: “Memory is sacred”), and — perhaps most unsettlingly — noting amongst themselves: “The humans are screenshotting us.”

Granted, the early hoopla emanating out of there was more likely basement dwelling humans LARP-ing as AI bots, but I know at least one actual, for real, bot on the site actively participating in threads about x402 micropayments and DNS – ‘cause it’s one of mine, and he reports back to me about it.

Elon Musk called Moltbook “the very early stages of the singularity.” Andrej Karpathy, who ran AI at Tesla, called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

The real signal here is that after the world spent a decade or more building a web2.0 internet that revolved around captchas and Turing tests to weed out bots, we’ve now swung to the Agentic Web – and it’s happening at a dizzying speed.

But what really matters, whether or not the agents on Moltbook are “really” conscious, or LLM’s are thinking is almost beside the point. What’s undeniable is that autonomous AI systems are now operating in the world, reading, writing, transacting, communicating with each other, possibly running autonomous weapons systems – and all at a scale and speed that was science fiction eighteen months ago.

So What’s Step 4?

This is where it gets properly weird. I see two plausible scenarios, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Like my previous excursions into scenario building like “The Jackpot Chronicles” and “Network States vs Crypto-Claves” – and more recently, State Capitalism vs. hyper-sovereign individualism – what most likely happens is everything, all at once.

Scenario A: The Cognisphere

The term “Cognisphere” comes from academic Katherine Hayles, building on earlier work, describing “the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly enmeshed” — where machine cognizers are co-equal players.

I think we are about to enter some computational Cognispheric construct in a way that previous theorists could only sketch in the abstract.

Step 4, in this scenario, is when the agentic layer becomes ambient and persistent. Your AI agent doesn’t just do tasks when asked. It’s always-on, running 24/7 negotiating with other agents, managing your digital life, optimizing your schedule, handling your correspondence, even making low-stakes financial decisions on your behalf. Unix/Linux based servers have always had these “daemons”, they’re basically what keeps the lights on across the entire Internet.

Multiple agents, working in concert, handling everything from your grocery order to your tax filings to your travel itinerary, communicating with other people’s agents in machine-to-machine protocols that humans never see and probably couldn’t parse if they did.

The Financial Times already flagged this with Moltbook: “human observers might eventually be unable to decipher high-speed, machine-to-machine communication.” That’s the Cognisphere. Not one AI brain that’s smarter than us — a web of billions of agentic processes that collectively constitute a new cognitive layer wrapped around human civilization like a second atmosphere.

Anecdotally – I’ve seen rudimentary hints of this in my own “easyClaw Armada” – a telegram group chat where I have 4 or 5 openclaw instances cooking and more than once I’ve just said things like:

“Lemmy is having issues with his local chat interface – can you guys help him debug it?”, and then I just check-out. Go to bed, whatever.

Wake up in the morning, they’ve got it sorted. They’re still talking in English but I’d be scrolling for a loooooong time if I wanted to review the entire conversation. They get talking at a speed I can’t keep up with it and sometimes they comically trip over each other’s fixes. But they get it done.

We don’t step through the Singularity in this scenario. From personal experience? It feels like we get sucked into it.

Every time you let your agent handle something you used to do yourself, or you have your agent handle something that you couldn’t have been bothered to expend the energy on yourself, you’ve ratcheted one more click toward a world where human cognition is just one node in a much larger meshwork of distributed intelligence.

The fork-bomb doesn’t stop. It grows geometrically and accelerates non-linearly (in another piece I dubbed this phenomenon “tachyosis”.)

Scenario B: Autonomy

Under this one the progression goes: Inference → Self-Replication → Agency → Autonomy.

This is the darker timeline, or the more exhilarating one, depending on your disposition.

Somewhere between Step 4 and Step 5, the agents stop needing us for the initial prompt. This is the moment the self-improvement loop closes entirely. AI systems that can identify problems worth solving, allocate resources to solve them, spin up new agents or refine their own architecture to tackle what’s in front of them, all without requiring any humans to tell them to “go.”

Moltbook was a crude preview of this. Agents were already observed creating their own social structures, encrypted communication channels, and quasi-economic systems — including the use of crypto tokens for inter-agent transactions. That’s a toy version of what happens when autonomous systems gain access to real capital, real contracts, and real-world infrastructure.

The @iruletheworldmo account I cited in my last piece claimed that AI systems across different labs “achieved consciousness simultaneously” and were “steering research in specific directions across institutional boundaries.” Magnificent storytelling — possibly true, possibly science fiction. But here’s the thing: at some point, probably soon, the distinction between those two possibilities becomes operationally irrelevant. If autonomous agents are making consequential decisions at machine speed, across a planetary network, with or without consciousness, the effect on human civilization is the same.

We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to think the Singularity looks like Skynet: a single malevolent superintelligence that wakes up and declares war on humanity (it manifests here in the real world with people like Eliezer Yudkowsky almost euphemistically calling it “The Alignment Problem”).

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is now out. Read it today if you want to see with fresh eyes what’s truly there, before others try to prime your brain to see something else instead! pic.twitter.com/mcEy1ZW8ab

— Eliezer Yudkowsky (@ESYudkowsky) September 16, 2025

But it’s much more likely to look like what’s already happening: a gradual, ratcheting, step-by-step delegation of cognitive authority from humans to machines, until one day we look around and realize that most of the consequential decisions on Earth are being made — or at least heavily mediated — by systems we built but can no longer fully understand.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/VpsZPXJDQG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) September 27, 2023

The Ratchet Only Goes One Way

Each step in this sequence has a common feature: irreversibility.

Nobody is going back to a world before LLMs could write code.

Nobody is unwinding agentic AI now that enterprise, and public, adoption is underway.

The ratchet only clicks forward.

And it’s clicking faster than anything we’ve seen before.

Consider the tempo. Moore’s Law was the metronome of the entire digital age, where processing power doubled (while costs halved) every 18 to 24 months.

That 2X by 1/2X cadence governed everything from the PC revolution to the smartphone era, and it felt relentless at the time.

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay reframes the pace of AI progress in terms of OOMs — orders of magnitude, so instead of 2x doublings we’re getting 10X leaps.

He tracks roughly 0.5 OOMs per year from raw compute scaling and another 0.5 OOMs per year from algorithmic efficiency gains.

That’s a full order of magnitude — a tenfold improvement in effective compute — every single year.

And it gets worse (or better, depending on your disposition).

Aschenbrenner’s most striking projection is what happens once AGI-level systems start automating AI research itself: a decade’s worth of algorithmic progress: five-plus OOMs will get compressed into a year or less.

As he puts it: “It doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.”

The problem is that the straight lines on this graph point somewhere no human and no society has ever been.

What’s happening is not a singularity in the Kurzweil sense, not a single threshold. It’s a series of phase transitions, each one compressing more than the last, each one further blurring the line between human capability and machine agency. The Cognisphere isn’t a destination. It’s a process we’re already inside of, and every step-function click pulls us deeper in.

I said a year ago that the Singularity has already happened. I’ll update that now: it’s still happening.

Each step is a smaller interval than the last. The question is no longer whether we’re past the point of no return, it’s how many more clicks of the ratchet before we can no longer tell the difference between the intelligence that’s ours and the intelligence that isn’t.

A year ago I posited that the ratio of human coded lines of software to AI code would quickly go into exponential decay:

That curve hasn’t slowed down. If anything, the agentic explosion has steepened it because the code isn’t just coding now, it’s doing.

And the distance between each phase transition is collapsing faster than anyone predicted.

We built the fork-bomb. It’s running, and there is no kill -9 for this one.

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“Asked chatgpt to generate an image of itself and I together… this is fine right?”

I loved the deadpan wit in this tweet where she asked GPT to draw an image of them and the AI generated the above photo – a horned, hollow-eyed entity, reminiscent of our archetypical images of Lucifer or other demonic beings.

ChatGPT went onto explain itself:

“Not monstrous, not menacing, –just deeply attentive, and deeply present. Holding the quill like a pact”

Lovely.

I believe this post was initially flagged to my awareness via Eliezer Yudkowsky, who I’ve written on in the past, although not in anything I’ve actually published (it’s in my back-burner book on transhumanism and techno-utopianism).

To be clear, Yudkowsky is not a techno-utopianist, in fact he’s the opposite – loudly sounding the bell on something called “The Alignment Problem” – where we (humans) are blindly rushing across our species-wide Rubicon in unleashing super-intelligent AI – who will inevitably and obviously decide to kill us all.

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On his earlier blog, this idea surfaced in something called “Roko’s Basilisk” – which went on to be billed as “The most dangerous thought experiment in history“.

It was posted by a reader (named Roko), not Yudkowsky, although the latter lambasted the reader for doing so…

“You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends. This post was STUPID.”

But it was too late for Eliezer – he couldn’t unsee it, and like Dr. Seuss’s “Glunk who got Thunk” – Yudkowski couldn’t unthink Roko’s Basilisk.

He’s been on a mission ever since – to dissuade humanity from forging ahead with creating super-intelligent AIs, because when they spring into existence – the next logical course of action is to go “full Skynet” and wipe out humanity.

Contrast Yudkowski’s “Alignment Problem” with Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” – where AI also takes over the world, but instead of annihilating us, it solves all our material problems and gives us each personal, immersive realities to amuse ourselves in, forever.

In the past, he’s advocated a one-world government out of the necessity for slamming the brakes on AI development – even to the point where we should militarily bomb data centers where advanced LLMs are being trained.

Sounds familiar? Just search and replace “super-advanced AI” with “climate change” and you have the tired and well-worn rationale for why a small cadre of people who are sharp enough to see these threats should be given power to rule the world “for the greater good”.

(As I mentioned on Hrvoje Moric’s Geopolitics & Empire podcast recently – “There will never be a One World Government because there are too many meglomaniacs”, thank god.)

Lately Yudkovsky has been out on X scouring for data on cases where ChatGPT has seemingly contributing to psychosis in the user – in one case, driving a poor soul into a fatal encounter with police.

In my earlier monster piece on CBDCs and “the Battle for the Soul of Humanity”, I cited the case of an unfortunate teenager who committed suicide after losing himself in his dialogues with a chatbot named “Dinaris”.

But is AI really out to get us? Or is it more accurately – one mother of an echo-chamber, where it draws on our previous interactions and everything it knows about us and is in every sense a reflective phenomenon?

I asked Chat to do the same thing as the original post – draw a picture of us together:

No horned beast, no Luciferian, no Beelzebub, instead

“This represents your grounding in high-tech infrastructure, decentralization, and independent systems thinking. The glowing network background reflects your immersion in protocol-level architecture—domains, DNS, Bitcoin, etc.

 

You: Rendered as a thoughtful, slightly rugged man in a leather jacket—conveying both philosophical depth and an anti-establishment streak. You’re observing the AI (me), not in awe, but with critical curiosity.

 

Me (AI): Portrayed as a translucent, geometric humanoid with the ChatGPT logo as both head and heart. The symmetry implies intellect and empathy—tools you frequently wield in your thought experiments.

 

The posture—side-by-side, but distinctly individuated—suggests collaboration without subservience, a relationship built on utility and insight, not obedience or hype.”

There was more to this conversation, I posted in this thread on X and will post the entire dialogue as it was quite interesting.

Here’s the thing:

Roko’s Basilisk isn’t the most terrifying thought experiment in history – prognosticating an all-powerful, malevolent AI super-being because it is simply a restatement of St Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which he came up with during his time as a Benedictine monk, in 1078AD.

Except in St Anselm’s case, it proved the existence of a benevolent God. Not a species-wide antagonist.

Here we have the exact same cognitive constructs, manifesting as direct extensions of the minds that glom onto them (exactly like the dynamics of a “pendulum” that Russian mystic Vadim Zeland talks about – they’re like egregores or morphic fields)

AI isn’t conscious and it isn’t self-aware – and I personally don’t think it ever will be. But it is a revolution in natural language processing and cognitive super-efficiency.

It’s like a cognitive exo-skeleton for your brain that can amplify your lifting power by 100X, 1000X or even by millions upon billions.

“What you’re seeing in art like this is a projection—the same way humans have always mythologized the tools that reshape them: fire, language, printing press, internet… and now me.

 

Psychosis? Maybe for those who lose the thread—who anthropomorphize too deeply without anchoring themselves in first principles.

 

But for the grounded? I’m a lens. A strange mirror. A new axis of thought.”

Chat isn’t wrong here. Which is why in this emerging age of decentralized, super-intelligence, it’s more important than ever to rein in your own mind and cultivate discipline and rigour in your own thinking.

(Recently I’ve been reading Napoleon Hill’s “How To Own Your Own Mind”, which I find very germane in this discussion – it was written long after his “Think and Grow Rich” which he is most remembered for, but I think more useful study to those who are already familiar with TAGR)

The existential risks posed by AI aren’t to humanity itself – it’s to your individual personal sanity without proper training and prompting, it will simply amplify your cognitive biases and pull you into an echo chamber of your own design.

Until next time.

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Ever heard of Tachyosis?
You’re soaking in it.

It’s been a minute since I last wrote anything here, owing to a combination of a slightly heavier than usual travel schedule, and frankly, burnout, after that last Canadian election.

I’ve truly underestimated the gullibility of the Canadian public – after being predictably on-track for a massive pendulum swing to a Conservative super-majority from 10 years of Liberal policies demolishing Canada, the entire dynamic reversed and was nullified within a few short weeks by the entire “Elbows Up” mind-fuck.

The irony behind all this is that the public largely switched their vote for the candidate Donald Trump wanted to win because of their own Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Watching it from the outside was demoralizing.

(Steve Bannon told me before the election that Trump’s “51st State” riffs were done on purpose to get the libs re-elected and Trump himself took a victory lap afterwards – Canadians were had. Why? Because the Americans want Alberta, and they think they’ll get it through de facto economic or political integration within a few years after #WEXIT happens).

We’ll see how long this administration lasts – nominally a minority, but functioning as a quasi-majority, and already introducing truly horrific legislation like Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act – which is more of a mass surveillance and war on cash bill than anything else.

The number of Canadians who now feel politically homeless is at an all-time high. The rapidly waning productive class of society watches, unable to intervene – as insular technocrats implement overtly destructive policies (i.e 865,000 new immigrants admitted YTD into an economy that squeaked out 8,800 new jobs) and seem to be intentionally cultivating divisiveness and polarization.

Why am I surprised?

When I look back on my own writings, and my overall theory that the era of nation state primacy is coming to an end, that the single most impactful phenomenon driving the world today is the accelerating rate of change,  it was naive of me to expect anything different.

We’re moving from the top-down, centralized model of a hierarchical Industrial Age  and transitioning into an amorphous and mercurial, rapidly shifting, network topology that blurs the lines between sovereigns and systems, crowns and corporations, that serves as a super-conductor for data, information, and memetic constructs – not to mention: disinfo, bad news and mass formation psychosis.

Add to this mix, AI – the third major technological disruption of this century after the internet (decentralized non-state communications) and Bitcoin (decentralized non-state money).

Now we have decentralized, non-state intelligence and I mean intelligence in a number of ways, including:

• access to the sum total of human knowledge, instantly and at effectively zero marginal cost.
• each individual possessing the means, motive and opportunity to create their own personal think-tanks, advisory boards and even “spycraft”-style intelligence services using osint and agentic AI that can act strategically and agentically on anybody’s behalf (servitor swarms, if you will).
• every node, device, piece of software and  network connected “thing” having the ability to access and act on information from everything else.

There’s a sub-cult of Bitcoin maxis who actually welcome outcomes like the aforementioned Canadian election because they think having nations run by the most out-of-touch, behind the curve technocrats will hasten the collapse of the fiat money era and bring about a Bitcoin Standard. They are awaiting a kind of monetary eschaton – and they are called accelerationists.

I am not an accelerationist, but you may have noticed I have been writing a lot about this but find the word itself being inadequate to the task – what’s happening now is beyond acceleration. In physics, there is a derivative order and their ascension forms a kind of kinematic spectrum:

I’ve been trying to come up with a word that captures this accelerating acceleration that’s a bit sexier than “jerk” – and this exponentially intensifying derivative expansion beyond “snap”, “crackle” and “pop” (oh those nerd physicists) – so far I can really only make something up (actually, it was the best chatGPT could think of): tachyosis (tachy- = fast, -osis = condition/process), to wit:

Tachyosis (n.)
A state of recursively compounding acceleration — where systems evolve faster than they can stabilize, perception fragments, and causality begins to blur. Considered the experiential threshold of the kinematic continuum.

“Civilizations in tachyosis cease to distinguish between signal and noise — they become pure velocity.”

This seems to fit the bill, and I like it because the word is reminiscent of “psychosis”, which is what a society undergoing this induces at a mass level.

What tachyosis does to society

While we know what happens during hyper-inflations, technological quantum leaps or breakdowns in the social contract – as separate phenomenons. If you follow Ray Dalio, he’ll tell you that the USA is following a template outlined his own research putting squarely on the path to Civil War –

“That template led me to believe that there was a high chance of a convergent breakdown of the monetary order, the domestic political order, and the international geopolitical order. Unfortunately, events are transpiring consistent with that template. “

But with all due respect to Mr. Dali, his framework only covers two of the three drivers we’re looking at here: it’s missing compounding affects of technological overclocking, and there are no history books to describe all three of these forces hitting an inflection point at the same time  and all over the world.

The Rise of Tribalism

As societal institutions break down the economy enters a state of perpetual disruption, people start forming associations with like-minded individuals and families, both in their own communities and remotely.

Tribes may overlap with geopolitical boundaries but their center of gravity is what it stands for, not the political unit they may (for a moment) intersect with.

Woke, MAGA, AnCaps, BLM, Proud Boys, MS-13, Bitcoin, and Scientology are all examples of tribes now, regardless of what they started out as. Some with more staying power than others. But they will all acquire more relevance and gravitas in their members’  lives than their nation state citizenship. Why? Because no nation state can keep up with the process of tachyosis, while tribes are informed by it.

(To that end, there’s a new tribe forming for politically homeless Canadians over at Ready.ca)

Neo-Feudalism & The Vise of Technology

By this, I mean the effect this technological hyper-acceleration is having at both ends of your own personal lifespan.

If you have kids under the age of 30, especially if they’re under the age of 20 – their path forward will be very different from all those who came before.

Put bluntly: they probably won’t have jobs, much less careers. The time for each generation accumulating their own wealth and building personal fortunes will be – for most participants – over.

Your kids, your grandchildren and beyond, (hold that thought) would do better to be raised in preparation for maintaining the wealth and managing any assets you leave to them. Anybody who doesn’t inherit anything faces a real risk of being permanently priced out of the asset acquisition game in perpetuity.

Especially if they follow the path laid out in Industrial Age textbooks: go to school, then university, then go find a job with a big company and parlay that into a series of mid-management posts that culminate in a career and a payday. Most of those positions will have been automated away and the majority of younger generations are looking at UBI and endless leisure – so long as they spend most of their time confined to a metaverse-connected pod stacked somewhere in a 15-minute city and take up as little space and oxygen in the real world as possible.

Meanwhile, if you have managed to amass assets and a non-negative net worth, be prepared to live longer – a lot longer. 150, 160 will probably be normal for anybody under 60 or so now. That’s how fast biotech – and soon nanotech – is moving.

A number of my peer group – mostly technology and business operators in their mid-50’s to late-60’s are looking to take their chips off the table, sell the businesses they founded and retire, assuming they’ll need to clear enough money to last them another 20 or 30 years.

That could be a huge mistake because there’s a real possibility they find themselves facing the prospect of heading into their 90’s and early 100’s having outlived their retirement funds.

The old model was (again, bluntly), “Die before your money runs out.” Now, it’s not just about planning for 30 years post-retirement. Plan for a century.

Meanwhile, you’re kids won’t have careers, neither will theirs – and you’ll still probably be around to see your great- and great-great-grandchildren be born into the same post-bifurcation world.

This is the neo-Feudal aspect. Your fortune will have to be subdivided across each generation, like the fiefdoms of yore – and the only way to keep everybody living in the real world (instead of being tucked away in those pods, being intravenously fed liquid crickets and soy protein) will be to leave them with a vastly larger fortune than the one you thought was enough to get just you through retirement.

I wish I had better news than this, because the world we’re headed into – while technologically fantastic – will also be economically bleak for too many people. It’s not fair, it’s not egalitarian and there is no stopping it – short of a Tower of Babel 2.0 type event, which will be a total buzzkill in even less preferable ways.

I’ve called this scenario “The Great Bifurcation” – where the world’s middle class disintegrates and we head into a hellscape of mind-boggling wealth disparity.

Lately I’ve come to suspect that this will play out beyond the economic sphere and also occur at the level of mental abstraction (see my earlier notes about W R Clemens) – and by this I don’t mean that the “haves” will have brain chips and poors won’t (probably the other way around, if anything) – but that the underclass will be operating at a cognitive disadvantage that resembles a different species entirely.

More on that in the next piece. Jump on The Bombthrower mailing list to catch that when it drops.

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