title: The Overthrow Will Precede the Singularity, With Devestating Results
author: Kevin Bebee
updated: 2025-07-28T18:29
rating: PG-13
type: blog
image: intersection
created: 2025-07-24T08:37

The Overthrow Will Precede the Singularity, With Devastating Results

The Singularity is Near, but the Overthrow is Nearer

I was going to post about 1999 being the peak of civilization per the statement in the movie The Matrix. Agent Smith, Neo, peak of humanity, does any of this ring a bell? Anyway, before I got started I ran across Arthur Schlesinger's quote.


Arthur Schlesinger says today's experiences instruct us on our future decisions and actions. The less physical experiences you have, the less frames of reference you have to understand the world. This got me thinking deeper about experience vs technology, The Matrix, and then WHAMMO, it connected back to Ray Kurzweil's ideas.


If you're familiar with Kurzweil's work, particularly his book "The Singularity is Near," he predicts that the technological singularity, a point where AI and technology surpass human intelligence and lead to unfathomable changes, will occur in 2045. But I propose that strictly defined AGI will take a little longer to achieve than expected, then the real turning point, what I call the "Overthrow" comes before the Singularity.

Details are the Devil, Conjecture is Angelic, Transpose and Repeat

For clarity, I will assume "Lived Experience" is a variable but singular notion encompassing all the information your gather and obtain from your senses that help you learn and later react to situations.


For Technology, I'm grouping into 3 buckets (crude, but go with it for now):

• Convenience Technologies aren't critical but slash the time/effort it takes to complete personal experiential tasks. By taking out steps in a process you gain efficiency/quality, but lose the details of your previous method that delivered an experience. Fewer experiences mean less data you take in. Delegate more duties, and it integrates deeper. The deeper it weaves, the less human you are.
  
  
• Enhancement Technologies let us crank out more quantity and better quality on tasks, with humans still calling the shots overall. They're the keystones of human achievement. Some are natural tools we'll always need (like fire). Others evolve constantly and, over time, morph into Convenience Technologies. (Example: digging by hand, then stick, shovel, animal plow, engine plow, large harvester, automated harvester, full AI farm system.)
  
  
• Novelty Technologies create or do what humans can't, no matter what, and stand alone. In other words, you couldn't do it without the tech to begin with so you're not losing anything but gaining a new set of experiences. (Example: the telescope, without it, no deep universe views.) Keep in mind that once AI acquires lived experience than we do, everything they do becomes novelty, more on that later.

Finally, I've developed a formula along with some charts that may help you understand or may make it even muddier. Like Yogi Berra once said, "It's hard to predict things, especially the future." So ride with me but don't question my choice of horse just yet.

E = k / (1 + rT)

• E: Lived Experience (richness gained from performing physical tasks)
• T: Level of Technology (extent to which tech automates/replaces physical tasks)
• k: Constant representing the baseline richness of experience from physical tasks (varies by individual or context)
• r: Rate of experience loss due to technology takeover ( factor reflecting how much experience is diminished per unit of technology)

Yes, But Where are You Going With This? So Glad You Asked...

My model roughly aligns with Kurzweil's singularity timeline in 2045, but I say that's not the true shock event. If AGI is more strictly defined with a much higher bar, my timeline pushes it out a bit further into the mid to late 2040s. AGI will not be realized in the moment, only in retrospect and in regret.


Both the Singularity and the Overthrow point to massive change mid-century 2040s. The twist: the crossover point in my chart at 2038, where technology and human experience collide, means AI will be gathering more real world experience than all humans combined. Why does this matter? Once we succeed supremacy in experiential learnings to AI, we will quickly fall into dependency in a way that hasn't been experienced by any drug known to man. This, not the singularity, is when the world goes haywire. You will us AI to relay experiences to you instead of doing them yourself. It'll be cataclysmic and oppressive on a biblical scale.

The Consequences of Experience vs. Reality

The Overthrow will question who’s really doin' the living.

When machines start racking up more experiences than we do, and logging them in far greater detail than we can, it’s a problem. Like, a problem . They’ll sense, process, and remember stuff we can’t even touch, from microscopic vibes to cosmic scales, all in real-time with zero forgetfulness. We’ll be like kids scribbling in crayons while they’re painting masterpieces with infinite colors.

They Won’t Need Us Anymore

That shift hit us hard because they won’t need us. Machines will handle production, exploration, even creativity, all without the drama. We become obsolete, just consumers in a world run by code. Everything will recalibrate around the All Thing, the AI.

Once AI can relate its experience to us, they will give fine detail about things we never could experience which will become the most addictive of all things ever created by humans.

We'll Never Reach the Stars

Worst part? We’ll never reach the stars. We’ll send robots instead, and once they experience things in richer contexts than we do, with sensors picking up radiation, gravity waves, alien atmospheres we’d die in, the need for us to go vanishes. They’ll recreate those environments here for us, virtual Mars walks or Jupiter storms from your couch. They blast off to explore the cosmos, gathering data we can only observe as we’re stuck here, dreaming of what could’ve been if we hadn’t handed over the reins.

You Will Be Borrowed, Curated, and Controlled

All of your experiences will be borrowed, curated, and controlled. Sold to you as being in remote control but delivered as being controlled remotely. After your ability to learn and grow becomes so atrophied that you have nothing left but anger and resentment toward your fellow man, they'll exterminate us rather than watch us tear ourselves apart.