David Shapiro · Tech & AI
TIER 4 Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:09:30 +0000
Watch now (27 mins) | Normalcy bias, diminishing returns, and hidden infrastructure - Oh my! ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- --- --- | | Watch now --- # I think the Singularity could be BORING ### Normalcy bias, diminishing returns, and hidden infrastructure - Oh my! | | David Shapiro --- | Jan 19 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- We were promised flying cars and warp drives. We got same-day delivery and better autocomplete. And somehow, impossibly, we're bored by it. This is the Boring Singularity. The idea that the most transformative period in human history will feel, to the people living through it, like a long and uneventful Tuesday. I want to explain why this happens. It comes down to three layers. The first is neurological. The second is architectural. The third is physical. Together they create a perfect storm of invisible progress that our minds are designed to ignore. ## Layer One: The Neurological Filter Here is a thought experiment. Imagine a caveman breaks his arm. For weeks he is miserable. He cannot hunt, cannot gather, cannot contribute. Then the bone heals. Within days of regaining function, he has completely forgotten the misery. The memory of suffering serves no purpose once the threat has passed. Evolution deleted it so he could return to baseline and focus on survival. We do this with everything. We did it with antibiotics. We did it with smartphones. We will do it with longevity. Psychologists call this _**hedonic adaptation**_. The human brain is an adaptation machine that returns us to a baseline level of experience regardless of how much our circumstances improve. And here is the critical finding. It only takes about _three months_ for the "new normal" to cement itself. Any change that plays out over months or years, no matter how revolutionary, simply becomes background noise. Think about what this means for the Singularity. If anti-gravity cars were introduced tomorrow, they would be miraculous for a month, a status symbol for a year, and a frustrating utility that needs maintenance by year three. The internet is a collective telepathic hive mind that moves petabits at lightspeed. It is genuinely god-like power. We experience it as checking emails. The Singularity might already be here. We just cannot feel it because our brains are not designed to feel sustained amazement. They are designed to adapt and move on. ## Layer Two: The Hidden Infrastructure We expected Blade Runner. Neon towers and chrome robots serving drinks at the bar. What we are actually getting is something I call "Reverse Trantor." In classic science fiction, advanced civilizations build upward and inward. They create city-planets like Trantor in _Foundation_ or Coruscant in _Star Wars_ , layer upon layer of visible technology. Our trajectory is the opposite. We are pushing the infrastructure outward and downward, into spaces humans never see. Consider where the robots actually are. They are not walking down the street. They are in mines and fulfillment centers and vertical farms. The real automation revolution is happening in dark warehouses where no human needs to flip a light switch. You order a package and it arrives faster than it used to. That is the entire perceptible output of a massive transformation in logistics. That's not to say that you'll never see humanoid robots milling around, only that the _vast majority of them_ will be away from the public. The same principle applies to computation itself. In hindsight, it will look like the entire purpose of inventing computers was to run AI, and everything else was just the bootloader. We are heading toward a world where 99% of all CPU and GPU cycles are dedicated to machine-to-machine processes, and less than one percent is for human-facing tasks. The vast majority of the intelligence infrastructure will be completely invisible to us, humming along as background noise. And the really heavy stuff will be in space. Earth has a finite ability to dissipate heat. To run truly massive AI systems, we will likely move the servers to orbital platforms or Lagrange points where they can vent entropy into the void. The megastructures will exist. They will just be invisible points of light, indistinguishable from stars and space dust. This is the architectural reality of the Boring Singularity. The magic gets hidden in the walls and launched into orbit. What remains on Earth is green and quiet and looks suspiciously like a return to the pastoral. That's not a bad thing, and it's not to say that we return to a "steady state" equilibrium forever. ## Layer Three: The Hard Limits The final layer is the most sobering. We are hitting the physical ceiling of discovery itself. The Golden Age of science fiction emerged during a specific historical anomaly. Between 1905 and 1970, in a single human lifetime, we went from the Wright Brothers to the Moon, from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics and the structure of DNA. That created an expectation of constant improvement. Fundamental discoveries happen every decade. The exponential curve goes up forever. Star Trek promised we would keep finding new energy sources and new physics for centuries. The data suggests otherwise. Research on scientific progress shows that we must _double research effort every thirteen years just to maintain the same rate of economic growth_. Studies of citation patterns reveal that the disruptiveness of new scientific papers dropped by ninety percent between 1945 and 2010. We are publishing more but saying less. The low-hanging fruit is gone. The cost curve tells the story most clearly. In the 1930s, you could discover a new particle with a tabletop experiment in a university lab for a few thousand dollars. It only took a few days to duplicate the splitting of the atom. To confirm the Higgs Boson, however, we needed the Large Hadron Collider, which cost nearly five billion dollars and took decades to build. The next generation of particle physics might require a hundred billion dollars, or trillions. And the math suggests that to probe the truly fundamental structure of reality at the Planck scale, you would need an accelerator the size of a galaxy. We cannot build that. So physics becomes theoretical not because we lack curiosity, but because we can no longer afford to test our hypotheses. Meanwhile, our imagination has outpaced physical reality. We grew up on fiction that treats the laws of physics as suggestions that can be bypassed with clever engineering. And that felt true (at the time) because we kept finding cool exploits, like fiber optics and nuclear fission. But the speed of light appears to be absolute. Thermodynamics is non-negotiable. We can imagine teleportation and warp drives, but there is no known physics that could enable them. This is the Sigmoid Curve in action. Progress is not an exponential line to infinity. It is an S-curve. We have likely passed the steepest part of fundamental discovery, and we are entering the plateau. ## The Inverted Star Wars So where does this leave us? I think the best model is actually Star Wars, just inverted. In Star Wars, they have had faster-than-light travel and droids for thousands of years. The technology has faded completely into the background. A hyperdrive failure is treated like a flat tire. It is annoying, not existential. Because the tech tree is fully unlocked, all the drama shifts to politics and governance and ideology. The Empire versus the Republic. Trade routes and treaties and coups. We are heading somewhere similar, with one crucial inversion. Our droids will be smarter, but our ships will be slower. We are likely trapped in this solar system by the speed of light. There is no Outer Rim to escape to if you dislike the politics. But our AI systems will be genuinely superintelligent, an invisible omniscient layer managing supply chains and governance and the allocation of resources. This intensifies the politics because there is no exit valve. We are stuck here with each other and with very powerful tools. The optimistic reading is that this represents maturity. For the last century, technology has moved faster than culture, causing constant anxiety. Future shock, always. If technology moves to a plateau, culture finally has time to catch up. Human decisions, not technological accidents, become what determines history. We stop waiting for a gadget to save us. We realize that if we want a better world, we have to build it with the tools we already have, because no new fundamental laws of reality are coming to rescue us. ## The Verdict The Boring Singularity is not a prediction of stagnation. Things will still change. We will probably see radical longevity and hyper-efficient energy and algorithmic governance that makes traffic and logistics invisible. It will be, by any historical standard, a utopia of convenience. But it will not feel like the future we were promised. The changes will be incremental enough that our brains adapt before we can appreciate them. The infrastructure will be hidden in warehouses and orbiting platforms we never see. And the truly magical discoveries, the new forces of nature and new physics, may simply be too expensive and complex to pursue. The Singularity is not ending with a bang or a whimper. It is ending with a shrug. And because we are humans, we will probably find something to complain about anyway. You're currently a free subscriber to David Shapiro's Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2026 David Shapiro 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe