Filtering the Singularity: why low-frequency trends now matter more than any single AI breakthrough
akbirthko · x · 2026-10-13
The author argues we're living inside Vernor Vinge's "opaque wall across the future," with fringe ideas becoming commonplace partly because models keep articulating them. Citing I. J. Good's intelligence-explosion passage and Vinge's singularity essay, he offers a frequency-domain view of exponential progress: below the API lies the high-frequency stuff (specific inventions, local observations), above it the low-frequency stuff (societal change, research directions). As general machine intelligence proliferates, the personal relevance of any single high-frequency event declines relative to low-frequency trends. Everyone already filters for these out of everyday incentives, but it's worth doing more deliberately.
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