We often hear people say, “The Singularity is coming.” However, lately, I’ve started to think—it’s not that it’s coming. It has already begun.
During the Industrial Revolution, those living through it didn’t think they were in a revolution. The invention of the steam engine was seen as just another new tool. Even when the railway network expanded and dramatically changed the speed at which people could move, it wasn’t called a “revolution” until much later.
When technology transforms society, it does so quietly, but surely. Those living through it can only see isolated “dots” of change. It’s only afterward, when the dots connect into lines and lines into planes, that the true scale becomes visible.
Today, generative AI is appearing everywhere. Writing text, creating images, generating voices, coding programs, supporting decision-making—activities that used to belong only to humans are gradually being replaced by AI.
Thinking back, there was the explosive spread of the internet, the practical implementation of GPUs, the paradigm shift to parallel processing, the mass adoption of smartphones. But we can no longer say exactly where it all started.
Most people probably think of smartphones or AI itself as revolutionary. But those are just points along the way. It’s likely that a revolution too massive to recognize is already underway.
Standing on the Earth, we don’t feel it racing through space at incredible speeds. Likewise, we are caught up in a vast movement right now. But from inside it, we cannot perceive our own motion.
The Singularity brought about by AI will be the same. We are already inside it.