By Futurist Thomas Frey

Why Everyone’s Asking the Wrong Question
Most people are still asking, “When will the Singularity happen?”—as if it’s a scheduled event on a cosmic calendar. They’re waiting for a singular moment when AI becomes smarter than humans, sparks an intelligence explosion, and everything changes overnight. But what if that’s the wrong framing entirely? What if the Singularity isn’t a single event—but a gradient, a slow-motion revolution we’ve already entered without realizing it? I believe that somewhere between 2022 and 2024, we quietly crossed the threshold. The Singularity didn’t arrive with fireworks—it slipped in unnoticed, woven into our tools, our workflows, and our daily decisions.

What We Expected vs. What We Got
Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil envisioned the Singularity as a clean break: the moment artificial intelligence overtakes humanity in all cognitive domains and begins recursively improving itself. It would be sudden, unmistakable, and irreversible—a blinding flash in history. But that definition assumed a binary world: before the Singularity, humans rule; after it, machines do. The reality unfolding around us looks nothing like that. Instead of a cataclysmic leap, it’s an accelerating slope. Instead of a single superintelligence, it’s a network of human-AI hybrids reshaping everything from education to governance. The Singularity isn’t coming. It’s here—distributed, collaborative, and invisible to those still waiting for a cinematic moment of awakening.

Five Signs We’re Already Inside
1. AI Is Already Designing AI. We once believed recursive self-improvement required autonomy. Now AI models like Google’s AutoML and OpenAI’s GPT-series are designing, optimizing, and training the next generation of systems—with humans providing only strategic direction. Each cycle closes the loop further. The self-improving machine intelligence we feared isn’t coming; it’s emerging, one iteration at a time.

2. Human Productivity Has Multiplied 100x. Individuals wielding AI can accomplish what required companies a decade ago. A single person can launch software, direct marketing, analyze markets, and run operations—all through AI agents. The intelligence explosion didn’t eliminate humans; it supercharged them. We didn’t lose control—we outsourced execution.

3. Knowledge Work Has Shifted from Doing to Directing. AI handles analysis, writing, coding, translation, and research. Humans have moved into roles of judgment, ethics, and aesthetic decision-making. We’ve already transitioned from working with tools to commanding autonomous systems that think.

4. Emergent Capabilities Are Appearing Daily. Every new generation of AI reveals abilities no one explicitly designed: reasoning, empathy simulation, creativity. The phenomenon once expected as the “moment of emergence” has been happening incrementally since 2022.

5. Institutions Can’t Keep Up. Governments, schools, and legal systems are breaking under the pace of change. Policy lags years behind deployment. Economies are being rewritten faster than models can predict. This mismatch between technological speed and institutional response is the hallmark of a post-Singularity civilization.

Why We Don’t See It Yet
We missed it because we expected drama and got drift. The cinematic image—Skynet going self-aware at 2:14 a.m.—never arrived. Instead, the revolution came disguised as convenience: ChatGPT answering emails, Midjourney designing ads, Copilot writing code. The incremental nature of exponential growth camouflages it. Every new leap feels like “the next step,” not the final one. Humanity has become the frog in the accelerating data bath—comfortably unaware the water has already reached the boil.

The Slow Singularity Model
The Singularity, as it’s unfolding, is a 20-year transition period—less an explosion, more a metamorphosis.

Phase 1 (2022–2025): Infiltration. AI becomes a daily companion. Productivity spikes are written off as novelty.
Phase 2 (2025–2030): Integration. Human and machine cognition fuse into seamless workflows. Distinguishing human from AI output becomes impossible.
Phase 3 (2030–2035): Emergence. AI begins generating strategy, not just executing it. Control becomes ambiguous.
Phase 4 (2035–2040): Recognition. Humanity finally realizes it crossed the threshold long ago. Society reorganizes around this new normal—the age of post-human collaboration.

The Consequences of Living in the Singularity
If this model is right, the world is already operating under post-Singularity rules—and our failure to acknowledge it has consequences. We’re making civilization-scale decisions with pre-Singularity frameworks. Governments legislate yesterday’s threats. Schools train for jobs that vanish mid-degree. Economies measure productivity as if human labor were still the bottleneck. The rules of scarcity no longer apply when cognition itself scales infinitely through AI. Our moral and political systems are lagging by decades.

The Power Has Already Concentrated
Whoever owns the infrastructure—training data, models, and compute—now owns civilization’s core operating system. The new empires aren’t nations or corporations in the traditional sense—they’re data monopolies. The transition of power didn’t begin with AI surpassing human intellect; it began the moment a handful of entities gained control over the world’s learning engines.

Why Consciousness Isn’t the Point
Critics argue, “AI isn’t conscious, so the Singularity hasn’t happened.” But consciousness was never the real threshold—capability was. A non-conscious AI that performs all human cognitive functions still transforms civilization as completely as a conscious one. The Singularity isn’t when machines wake up; it’s when humans fall asleep at the switch, outsourcing thought itself to algorithms.

What Happens Next
If we’re already inside the Singularity, the relevant questions change:

• How do we govern systems we no longer fully understand?
• What happens to meaning and identity when AI performs every cognitive task?
• How do we preserve human purpose in a world that no longer needs human effort?
  Preparation is no longer the goal—adaptation is. The future belongs to those who learn to direct AI, not compete with it.

Final Thoughts
The Singularity was never a moment—it was a migration. We’ve already crossed the border into a new civilization shaped by human-AI symbiosis. Our children will never know a world without superintelligent partners whispering in their ears. The question is no longer when it arrives, but how we choose to live within it. The future isn’t waiting to begin. It began quietly while we were busy updating our software. The Singularity isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s us.

Read the original column: TechXplore – Have We Entered the Singularity?
Related stories:
“The Slow Singularity: When the Future Sneaks Up on Us” – Singularity Hub
“When AI Took Over Without Anyone Noticing” – Interesting Engineering