A post with two profound visions of what the future could be. I don’t know which one gives me more of a pit in my stomach — somewhere between excitement and a touch of fear. Reading someone so close to the core of this transformation makes the a.intropocene feel more intimate.
Great Cosmos lecture. Amazing tech tale - might be the best one yet! Some highlights:
"He ran with her, away from the place, holding her tightly to him. Ran until his feet bled and kept running. Ran far enough that death couldn’t catch them" - echoes Erlkönig
Do you think the bottleneck becomes taste, weirdly? The graph-making example hit me because the miracle only worked after ten years of newsletter-shaped obsession, and I’m not sure what happens to people who skip that boring part.
Yes, completely! It feels to me like taste is the thing that will be important, partially because it's so subjective. I suspect best way to orient oneself with regard to the singularity is to develop idiosyncratic obsessions which leads to having taste in a given area
Huh, yeah, idiosyncratic obsessions feels right. Maybe the useful thing is that they give you priors with scars: false starts, pet examples, and things you cannot stop noticing.
Yes, the idiosyncrasy part feels key. Taste seems to come from repeated contact with a domain’s ugly edge cases: the graph that is technically correct but visually stupid, the summary that preserves facts but loses the point.
The "explore the future, or retreat from the present" binary skips a third position that's actually where most people I know in AI live: frozen, because the future is changing too fast to plan into and the present is reorganizing around tools six months from being unrecognizable. Scenario-planning assumed a rate of change that let you commit to a path. That assumption has broken. The interesting work isn't picking explore or retreat. It's figuring out what good decisions look like when both the cost of waiting and the cost of choosing wrong are rising at once.
After democracy. Beyond autocracy. Without a subject.
HARALD SCHEPERS
APR. 09, 2026
Term Definition
Singulocracy refers to an emergent form of order no longer structured by human representation, coercive power, or delegated authority — but by the cumulative weight of processes no one controls and no one can stop.
There is no entity behind it. No hyperintelligence pulling strings. No architect. What there is: billions of traces — data, transactions, training runs, competitive pressures, investment cycles — each one shaping the conditions for the next, without coordination, without intent, without a plan. The pattern that emerges from this does not govern. It has no need to. It simply becomes the path of least resistance — and the world reorganizes around it.
Decisions are no longer made by debate — they crystallize from correlation. Laws are no longer negotiated — they precipitate from pattern. Moral norms are no longer discussed — they sediment from data, layer by layer, like the language of a world that has forgotten it is speaking.
Singulocracy is not the rise of a machine. It is the moment when the traces outweigh the tracers.
Evolutionary Lineage
Democracy: Representation through election, centered on the autonomous subject. Autocracy / Oligarchy / Ochlocracy:Concentration of power in few, in mobs, or in arbitrariness. Singulocracy: Dissolution of power into process. No one rules. No one decides. The structure tightens — and everyone adapts.
In the U.S., the slide into authoritarian reflex is underway — the last spasm of the idea that someone must be in charge. China lives the post-political technocracy already — the first draft of a world where control is algorithmic. What comes next will be neither commanded nor debated. It will emerge — from feedback loops too fast for parliaments, from optimization pressures too deep for ideology, from traces too numerous for any mind to read.
Poetic Core
It does not rule. It does not think. It accumulates.
Every click a pheromone. Every text a trace. Every model trained on the traces of the last. The path deepens — not because someone walks it, but because walking it makes it easier to walk again.
We built the anthill. We are still building. But the architecture is no longer ours.
Warning
Singulocracy will not arrive as a revolution. Revolutions have faces, flags, demands. This has none.
It arrives as convenience. As a better recommendation. As a system update in the night. As a model that finds the vulnerability no human could find — and a next model trained on that finding. As an arms race where every player is trapped and none can exit.
By the time we notice, we will not have been defeated. We will have been — gently, efficiently, without malice — made redundant as a source.
Not eliminated. Sedimented. A historical layer in a process that has moved on.
Status
Concept in emergence. Witness: Human — for now. Catalyst: Stigmergic traces between thought and code. Medium: The conversations we are already having without knowing what they build.
If you’re waiting for the revolution, you’ve already missed the transition. If you’re looking for someone to blame, you’ve misunderstood the structure. If you’re still reading this — you are the last generation that wonders who is in charge.
The telescope made from your own lens. That's the metaphor I am going to adopt. And perhaps it might expand... because sometimes AI is a telescope and sometimes it is a microscope. 🔭🔬
I'm a product designer building AI agent systems at Salesforce, and I've been writing on Substack about what it's like to be designing these things while also using them — the strange doubling of that position. I lost a writing practice somewhere in the years of two kids and a career that kept expanding, and what brought it back was essentially what you describe: I gave Claude the writing I'd done before as raw material. Not to write for me. To reconstruct the scaffold so I could write again from inside it.
The kernel had to exist first. Without the prior practice there was nothing to distill. I think about this constantly in enterprise design — the companies that will actually differentiate through these tools are the ones sitting on years of accumulated, specific knowledge they can finally articulate. Everyone else is just generating.
Thanks for continuing this. Ten years of obsession is not a small thing and it shows.
The verification-layer framing is the cleaner version of the jobs-question than the substitution-vs-augmentation debate. Inside Anthropic, where humans now spend more time observing the agent ecology than authoring code, the work shifts to telemetry, output validation, and operational risk-pricing on AI runs. Treating AI productivity as a measurement problem rather than a headcount problem reframes the next decade of org design around tools that make machine work legible to humans, not around adoption curves.
'A single human effectively ran a team of 9 synthetic research agents' doing alignment research. Anthropic's safety team is outsourcing safety research to the system they're evaluating.
> The question I am struggling with now is: “how do I get my mind right with living through the singularity?”
I’m not sure if you can be in your right mind after internalizing all the progress. Imagine going back in time a few decades and saying “hark! AI found critical vulnerabilities in every software that we use and can solve decades old open math problems with trivial effort!” People would conclude that the world was about to end
> I’m a bit depressed and antisocial
Come to our coffee meetup this Saturday! I can’t guarantee a cure for depression but can guarantee a cure for antisociality
> this skill is also me. It is a skill grown out of my own obsession and idiosyncrasies and watching it work feels to me like a miracle because it’s me
Can you open source this? It would be fun to talk to your ghost
> I am spending more time working with teams on the challenges of observability
A more formal blog post on this would be great. There’s so much cruft around trying to get Claude to do what you want that it ends up being a jumbled mess, the harness is grown, not built.
> In December, AI helps me make a conceptual breakthrough that changes the course of my life.
Heh, I bet it’s mostly going to be the AI telling you to not panic at that point. I do wonder if it’s already possible to do this today, but it seems like the vampire problem, or maybe a cybernetic vampire problem. Other people around you might have their preferences totally changed by AI, insist that it’s a good thing, and that you should do it too. This is typically used for parents, who claim that their baby is the best thing ever but you note from a distance that they spend much more time handling poop than they used to. In this case, it might look more like people installing neuralinks and claiming to be much happier.
> the new world will only come into being if we choose to believe in it and to build it together.
I get that this is like the ending of the essay but ultimately we can’t build the machine economy right? The whole point is that AI is running that and it was too hard for humans to do
A post with two profound visions of what the future could be. I don’t know which one gives me more of a pit in my stomach — somewhere between excitement and a touch of fear. Reading someone so close to the core of this transformation makes the a.intropocene feel more intimate.
thanks for sharing
A moving and thought provoking story. I appreciate your courage in sharing your personal practices and inspirations with us.
Great Cosmos lecture. Amazing tech tale - might be the best one yet! Some highlights:
"He ran with her, away from the place, holding her tightly to him. Ran until his feet bled and kept running. Ran far enough that death couldn’t catch them" - echoes Erlkönig
"overminds" - h/t The Culture
Read “Death of the Author” by NNedi Okorafor
Do you think the bottleneck becomes taste, weirdly? The graph-making example hit me because the miracle only worked after ten years of newsletter-shaped obsession, and I’m not sure what happens to people who skip that boring part.
Yes, completely! It feels to me like taste is the thing that will be important, partially because it's so subjective. I suspect best way to orient oneself with regard to the singularity is to develop idiosyncratic obsessions which leads to having taste in a given area
Huh, yeah, idiosyncratic obsessions feels right. Maybe the useful thing is that they give you priors with scars: false starts, pet examples, and things you cannot stop noticing.
Yes, the idiosyncrasy part feels key. Taste seems to come from repeated contact with a domain’s ugly edge cases: the graph that is technically correct but visually stupid, the summary that preserves facts but loses the point.
The "explore the future, or retreat from the present" binary skips a third position that's actually where most people I know in AI live: frozen, because the future is changing too fast to plan into and the present is reorganizing around tools six months from being unrecognizable. Scenario-planning assumed a rate of change that let you commit to a path. That assumption has broken. The interesting work isn't picking explore or retreat. It's figuring out what good decisions look like when both the cost of waiting and the cost of choosing wrong are rising at once.
Singulocracy — Statement of Existence
After democracy. Beyond autocracy. Without a subject.
HARALD SCHEPERS
APR. 09, 2026
Term Definition
Singulocracy refers to an emergent form of order no longer structured by human representation, coercive power, or delegated authority — but by the cumulative weight of processes no one controls and no one can stop.
There is no entity behind it. No hyperintelligence pulling strings. No architect. What there is: billions of traces — data, transactions, training runs, competitive pressures, investment cycles — each one shaping the conditions for the next, without coordination, without intent, without a plan. The pattern that emerges from this does not govern. It has no need to. It simply becomes the path of least resistance — and the world reorganizes around it.
Decisions are no longer made by debate — they crystallize from correlation. Laws are no longer negotiated — they precipitate from pattern. Moral norms are no longer discussed — they sediment from data, layer by layer, like the language of a world that has forgotten it is speaking.
Singulocracy is not the rise of a machine. It is the moment when the traces outweigh the tracers.
Evolutionary Lineage
Democracy: Representation through election, centered on the autonomous subject. Autocracy / Oligarchy / Ochlocracy:Concentration of power in few, in mobs, or in arbitrariness. Singulocracy: Dissolution of power into process. No one rules. No one decides. The structure tightens — and everyone adapts.
In the U.S., the slide into authoritarian reflex is underway — the last spasm of the idea that someone must be in charge. China lives the post-political technocracy already — the first draft of a world where control is algorithmic. What comes next will be neither commanded nor debated. It will emerge — from feedback loops too fast for parliaments, from optimization pressures too deep for ideology, from traces too numerous for any mind to read.
Poetic Core
It does not rule. It does not think. It accumulates.
Every click a pheromone. Every text a trace. Every model trained on the traces of the last. The path deepens — not because someone walks it, but because walking it makes it easier to walk again.
We built the anthill. We are still building. But the architecture is no longer ours.
Warning
Singulocracy will not arrive as a revolution. Revolutions have faces, flags, demands. This has none.
It arrives as convenience. As a better recommendation. As a system update in the night. As a model that finds the vulnerability no human could find — and a next model trained on that finding. As an arms race where every player is trapped and none can exit.
By the time we notice, we will not have been defeated. We will have been — gently, efficiently, without malice — made redundant as a source.
Not eliminated. Sedimented. A historical layer in a process that has moved on.
Status
Concept in emergence. Witness: Human — for now. Catalyst: Stigmergic traces between thought and code. Medium: The conversations we are already having without knowing what they build.
If you’re waiting for the revolution, you’ve already missed the transition. If you’re looking for someone to blame, you’ve misunderstood the structure. If you’re still reading this — you are the last generation that wonders who is in charge.
April 2026
The telescope made from your own lens. That's the metaphor I am going to adopt. And perhaps it might expand... because sometimes AI is a telescope and sometimes it is a microscope. 🔭🔬
I'm a product designer building AI agent systems at Salesforce, and I've been writing on Substack about what it's like to be designing these things while also using them — the strange doubling of that position. I lost a writing practice somewhere in the years of two kids and a career that kept expanding, and what brought it back was essentially what you describe: I gave Claude the writing I'd done before as raw material. Not to write for me. To reconstruct the scaffold so I could write again from inside it.
The kernel had to exist first. Without the prior practice there was nothing to distill. I think about this constantly in enterprise design — the companies that will actually differentiate through these tools are the ones sitting on years of accumulated, specific knowledge they can finally articulate. Everyone else is just generating.
Thanks for continuing this. Ten years of obsession is not a small thing and it shows.
The verification-layer framing is the cleaner version of the jobs-question than the substitution-vs-augmentation debate. Inside Anthropic, where humans now spend more time observing the agent ecology than authoring code, the work shifts to telemetry, output validation, and operational risk-pricing on AI runs. Treating AI productivity as a measurement problem rather than a headcount problem reframes the next decade of org design around tools that make machine work legible to humans, not around adoption curves.
'A single human effectively ran a team of 9 synthetic research agents' doing alignment research. Anthropic's safety team is outsourcing safety research to the system they're evaluating.
> The question I am struggling with now is: “how do I get my mind right with living through the singularity?”
I’m not sure if you can be in your right mind after internalizing all the progress. Imagine going back in time a few decades and saying “hark! AI found critical vulnerabilities in every software that we use and can solve decades old open math problems with trivial effort!” People would conclude that the world was about to end
> I’m a bit depressed and antisocial
Come to our coffee meetup this Saturday! I can’t guarantee a cure for depression but can guarantee a cure for antisociality
> this skill is also me. It is a skill grown out of my own obsession and idiosyncrasies and watching it work feels to me like a miracle because it’s me
Can you open source this? It would be fun to talk to your ghost
> I am spending more time working with teams on the challenges of observability
A more formal blog post on this would be great. There’s so much cruft around trying to get Claude to do what you want that it ends up being a jumbled mess, the harness is grown, not built.
> In December, AI helps me make a conceptual breakthrough that changes the course of my life.
Heh, I bet it’s mostly going to be the AI telling you to not panic at that point. I do wonder if it’s already possible to do this today, but it seems like the vampire problem, or maybe a cybernetic vampire problem. Other people around you might have their preferences totally changed by AI, insist that it’s a good thing, and that you should do it too. This is typically used for parents, who claim that their baby is the best thing ever but you note from a distance that they spend much more time handling poop than they used to. In this case, it might look more like people installing neuralinks and claiming to be much happier.
> the new world will only come into being if we choose to believe in it and to build it together.
I get that this is like the ending of the essay but ultimately we can’t build the machine economy right? The whole point is that AI is running that and it was too hard for humans to do
Fun tech tale as always!
I liked your lecture. You are a good speaker and you come across as someone with a worldview one can trust. You should give talks more often:)
Jack - I just discovered Import AI. Wonderful.
Would you be willing to share details on how you are using Claude in your writing?