What Happens to Us After the Singularity

Almost every keynote ends the same way. The applause fades, a hand goes up, and the question arrives: what happens to us, to people, when technology reaches the singularity?

It’s a fair question. My answer tends to surprise the room, because it has nothing to do with machines. It has to do with the thirty trillion cells sitting in the chair asking the question. They passed their own singularity a long time ago.

Your cells already live on the other side

Every cell in your body wakes up with unconditional access to everything it needs.

A skeleton gives it structure. The digestive system delivers energy and nutrition. The nervous system carries information. The reptilian brain runs whatever should never require attention: heartbeat, breathing, temperature. The social brain adds feeling and connection. The neocortex adds intelligence. The prefrontal cortex adds reasoning and the ability to think years ahead.

Nothing is missing. A liver cell never worries about oxygen logistics, immune defense, or where the next glucose molecule is coming from. It does the one thing it exists to do, and it does that thing well, precisely because every cell around it is free to do the same. Each one sits at the center of its own support system, fully backed and fully aligned with its reason for being here.

That is what life after singularity looks like from the inside. Not a machine waking up. A support layer finally finished.

We are running the same seven waves, one level up

Cells built organisms. We build organizations, and from organizations, societies. The seven waves I describe in my work run through both stories in the same order, for the same reasons.

In biology those waves took hundreds of millions of years. In our technological layer they are taking decades, and each wave arrives faster than the one before it.

Look at what we’ve built so far. Roads, buildings, villages, cities, laws and governments: our skeleton, the structure everything else can stand on. Power grids, supply chains and industry: our digestion. Telecom and the internet: our nervous system. Company software and automation: our reptilian brain, running the repetitive work nobody should have to think about. Social platforms and big data: a rough, noisy first version of a social brain. Large AI models: the neocortex arriving. Reasoning models and agents: the prefrontal cortex, showing up right now, in public, a few years earlier than most people expected.

We are somewhere in wave six, moving into seven.

Why I keep pointing at 2035

Each wave compresses. Line them up and the pattern points at roughly 2035 for the moment the technological layer completes itself, the way the biological layer once completed itself inside us.

If the pattern holds, you will wake up that year with what every cell in your body already has. Solid infrastructure. Energy that no longer costs the planet. Information on tap. Automation for everything repetitive. Systems that read context and feeling. Intelligence as a utility, priced like electricity. Reasoning you can lean on for the hard calls.

Then the interesting question starts. When the machinery of survival is handled, the work that remains is the work only a person can do: what you care about, who you care for, what you decide is worth building.

Organizations will follow. I expect swarm structures to become normal, where small groups form around a purpose, create value, dissolve, and form again somewhere else. Organizations as a service. Structure following purpose, instead of purpose being squeezed into whatever structure already exists.

The human part gets harder, not easier

Here is the part I care most about, and the part I think gets underestimated.

A cell that has everything still has to do its job. Abundance hands you room, not meaning. When intelligence becomes cheap and universally available, what stays scarce is everything that makes you you.

Intuition. Empathy. Taste. Flow. The nerve to choose a direction when the data stays silent. The ability to sit with another person in a difficult hour and stay present. These have been filed under soft skills for forty years. In the Soul Economy they become the hardest currency we have, and the only one that can’t be copied at zero marginal cost.

That’s what I mean when I say technology helps us become more human. Every wave so far has taken something off our shoulders that we were never designed to carry. The last waves take the rest. What’s left over is the spark.

None of this arrives by itself

Cells that stop cooperating with the whole don’t create abundance. They create cancer. The same risk exists one level up, in a technological layer built to serve a few instead of carrying everyone.

The waves tell us what becomes possible. What we do with the finished layer is decided by people, in rooms, in the next handful of years. Those decisions are being made now, by leaders who mostly don’t yet realize that’s what they’re deciding.

Over to you

So here’s my question for you, and I read every reply.

When the survival layer is fully handled, somewhere around 2035, what would you spend your working life on that you can’t spend it on today? And what do you believe stays scarce once intelligence no longer is?

Tell me in the comments. I’m collecting answers for the next issue.