A few days ago, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, went on a podcast and declared that “the singularity is here!” He elaborated that this is a wonderful thing he’s dreamed about his whole life and that tremendous global abundance is right around the corner.

Now, never mind that no one agrees on what the word singularity means in the context of technology. Science fiction writer Victor Vinge coined it to mean a moment when technological progress reaches a point where humans could no longer comprehend it. But this meaning has been adapted by others to mean the moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence — or when machine self improvement takes root and leads to exponential improvement in machine capability.

Whatever. We mere mortals have no way of knowing if this fictional horizon has opened up or not. But as someone who has worked as a rhetorician all my adult life, I can report with confidence that we’ve reached the rhetorical singularity, the moment when the financial rewards of outrageous hype has exceeded the risks associated with unkept promises.

I could venture into a discussion about AI company capex and upcoming IPOs, but why bother? There are dozens of YouTube videos out there produced every day on this subject and you can borrow into them if you choose.

Instead, I want to take a turn to Montaigne, who in his third essay bemoaned the human habit of “always gaping after future things.” Instead of, for example, settling in with the AI tools we have right now and learning how to put them to productive use, we focus on the next model and its potential capabilities, and the models after that and the investments necessary to achieve those capabilities.

We’re not even sure that we like and can make good use of the AI we already have and we’re looking to that horizon, partly in a “just imagine how much better this will be soon!” promise, but also a “don’t worry about the things that don’t work so well now, we’ll soon be so far beyond that” dreaming.

But even that is too practical to discuss what’s going on in AI. Montaigne described it perfectly in the 16th century:

We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be.

That last part lands particularly strong, because some element of that “shall no longer be” formulation is baked into the AI hype. The weak part, the one AI companies are now trying to sell us, is that AI will soon become essential helper tools for our civilization, leading to scientific advances (and massive profits) that will make our current likes unrecognizable (and did we mention profits?)

The stronger argument, which AI companies (well, other than Elon’s) are desperately trying to backpedal away from, is that these technologies will replace huge segments of the workforce and make working optional for much of humanity. And let’s not forget that there are elements of transhumanism in the AI true believers camp as well who think we are creating a new species and its somehow the destiny of humanity to replace ourselves.

It sounds insane, but the doom narratives of this culture are just as essential to the story telling and narrative promotion as the utopian dreams. Each company has to proclaim that the risks and rewards are astounding, so their company has to be the sole winner. And the sole winner narrative isn’t crazy either. Capital expenditures (I know, I promised not to delve into capex, but indulge me in one point) are so extreme that while it is vaguely possible one company might benefit from all the data center buildout and find profitability from it, it’s financially impossible for all of the investments to pay off.

There’s another element in this transhumanism ethic that I need to bring up — this idea that we’re creating a kind of immortality by investing in AI, betting on medical advances so remarkable that life expectancy will increase by more than a year every year. And this brings us back to the rest of Montaigne’s essay, which shifts its focus to questions of legacy and after-life plans.

Montaigne’s position on the afterlife is best summed up by a Seneca quote:

You ask where you will lie after your death? Where lie the souls unborn.

The natural state of existence isn’t life. Life is a fleeting chapter in the vastness of existence. To imagine a future where your personal existence will extend into eternity is to take the great vanity of humanity, this fantasy that we are a uniquely important species and you are a unlikely important representative of that species, and impose it on eternity.

What arrogance. It isn’t enough for some people to reach superhuman wealth, they have to imagine enjoying that wealth and power eternally as well. It almost makes you wish for an alien or AI takeover just to extinguish their self-glorifying ego dreams once and for all.

The beauty of Montaigne’s perspective is that he doesn’t even permit death to take on the role of punisher. He sees it as another state of nature and perhaps one that holds undiscovered truths and positive notes within it:

Even so nature shows us that many dead things still have occult relations to life. Wine alters in the cellars according to certain seasonal changes in its vine. And venison changes its condition and flavor in the salting tubs according to the laws of the live flesh, so they say.

Nature has its own designs for us, beyond our dreams and desires to engineer our destiny.