I was right about the singularity. I was wrong about the wires.

Eight years ago I wrote a piece on LinkedIn that closed with the words "The singularity is here!" in the can't-look-away exclamation-mark register. I quoted Ray Kurzweil. I cited the World Economic Forum's Fourth Industrial Revolution. I described mankind converging with machines by 2030 and said it cheerfully.

Reading it back this week, the surprising thing is what I would flip on, and what I would not.

I would not flip on the optimism. Alexa+ landed in the UK this month and is genuinely useful. We are absolutely on a curve where, by 2030, "converging with machines" stops sounding hyperbolic — and starts being something most people have done by Tuesday lunchtime, in their kitchen, on their wrist, in their bed.

I would not flip on the timeline either. Kurzweil's curve, eight years on, is still tracking.

What I would flip on is the shape.

I was picturing a Kurzweil-style fusion. Implants. Bionic ascendance. Neuromancer. What we got is quieter and weirder: psychological codependency. We are not merging with machines via wires. We are merging with them via attention.

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We are not merging with machines via wires. We are merging with them via attention.

I check the model the way I check a window. I outsource memory, sequencing, recall, increasingly judgment. I save cycles I would have spent thinking, and I am not entirely sure where those cycles have gone. Wearables count, in the sense that they are how some of us are starting to touch this convergence. But the meaningful integration is happening higher up. In the head. Across hours.

Eight years ago I would have said this was the same thing as Kurzweil's prediction. Eight years on, I think it is more like the relational version of what fiction kept telling us. Neuromancer warned about codependency before it had hardware to point at. The hardware mattered less than the pattern.

The thing that has aged worst is not a specific prediction. It is the register. "The singularity is here!" reads now like someone announcing weather. Eight years later, the texture is different — quieter, stickier, harder to point at. Not less profound. Just less dramatic.

Same singularity. Different clothes.

— maria