The Experience Singularity

I can’t tell you the exact moment it happened. But something flipped. It was just a taste. A glimpse. But it was real. And I want it back. I want it fully realized.

At some point in the last year, as I, like so many others, sat drinking from the AI firehose, it hit me. One day I was using it. The next day I wasn’t aware of using anything at all. There was just the work, moving faster than the work used to move. And there was me in the middle of it. And it was flowing. And I had lost sight of the seam. It just disappeared into the fabric. It was just a moment. A glimpse. But it was real. And it was one of the most exciting feelings I’d ever felt. It was also terrifying in a way I’d never experienced.

I started calling it the Experience Singularity. I don’t fall into those sort of ™ phrases often. But this one felt right. It felt exciting…like riding the unknown. It also felt menacing. And it should.

You probably already know the other one. The technological singularity. The runaway curve. The point of no return where intelligence accelerates past us until it stops needing us. It’s the horizon you can’t see over and you can’t come back from it. The machine becomes everything. We’ve been telling each other that story, half in warning and half in worship, for decades. It’s a living episode of ‘Black Mirror,’ where I can’t wait to see what’s next and then I wish I hadn’t seen it. But I come back for more. You get the point.

To be clear, I am absolutely talking about the same curve. Same curve. Same gravity. Same point of no return. But it’s pointed the other way.

The technological singularity is the machine waking up. It’s the machine becoming everything. The Experience Singularity is the machine getting out of the way. It’s the point where technology and experience become a single thing. It’s where the seam between the system and the feeling closes so completely you can’t find it. And maybe you don’t want to. When you move in this direction, the machine disappears, not because it got weaker but because it got good enough to actually disappear.

And on the far side of the Experience Singularity, the thing that becomes everything isn’t the machine. It’s the person.

Same singularity. Complete opposite ending.

It’s still very conceptual. But it’s coming. So let’s think for a minute about the before and after. This is the part that changes everything.

Before…

Technology is something you add to an experience. You can point at it. It has parts you can identify. The screen. The app. The kiosk. The thing you bolt on and hope nobody trips over it. And experience is authored: a team designs it once then ships it out to many. And the ceiling on how good it gets rests completely on how much a human hand can make…by hand.

After…

Technology is the medium the experience is made from. You point at it the way you’d point at electricity in the middle of a conversation. You don’t. And experience isn’t authored anymore. It’s generated. Live. Per person. In the moment. The ceiling that used to be human authoring capacity is just gone.

That is why this earns a new word instead of a fresh coat of paint on “seamless” or “immersive.” Take it seriously and three things move at once.

Measurement flips. Before, we counted the technology — impressions, scans, dwell time. After, there’s one honest question left: could they find the seam. If they noticed the tech, you failed. The score was never what the system did. It’s whether the person ever knew a system was there.

The job flips. You stop making experiences and start building the engines that generate them — and the taste that governs what those engines are allowed to make. That second part is the whole job now.

And taste becomes the only scarce thing left. When anyone can generate infinite competent experience for nothing, competent is worthless. Everyone will have the same engines. Endless, frictionless, forgettable mediocrity, on tap. The one thing that can’t be generated is the judgment about what’s worth generating. Having an opinion — a real one, the kind you’d defend in a room — stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the entire game.

Here’s what makes the word honest, though. A singularity is a horizon. You don’t get to see past it, and you don’t fully control what’s waiting on the far side. And this one has two versions, sitting very far apart.

Point it at people, and it is the most human thing we have ever built. Connection at an intimacy and a scale no team could ever have authored by hand — the right moment finding the right person, every time, because the machine that made it was invisible enough to step back and let two humans be human. That’s the flower coming up through the crack in the pavement. That’s the version I’m in this for.

Point it at extraction instead — let the incentives drive — and the exact same power becomes frictionless manipulation. Infinite mediocrity wearing personalization as a mask. An experience tuned so precisely to move you that you never once notice you were moved. The seam disappears there too. Same technology. Same disappearance. Opposite intent.

And I want to be clear about where that fork actually sits, because it is not in the technology. It never is. The machine doesn’t choose. It won’t be malice that decides it, either — it almost never is. It’ll be incentives. A quarterly number, and a room full of people who knew better and pointed the engine at the easy thing anyway.

The machine is going to disappear either way. Whether the person or the profit is what’s left standing when it does — that part is still ours.

But the human version does not happen by default. The incentives don’t point that way. It only happens if we build toward it on purpose, against the pull, with our eyes open.

If we allow it.