The singularity is a straight line. Intelligence might move in circles.
- Published
- January 22, 2026
- Reading time
- 2 min
- Topics
- intelligence · singularity · time · science fiction
Singularity is a great word for selling a future. It sounds like an event — a threshold, something you could in principle circle on a calendar. And the moment you accept the word, you have quietly accepted its shape: a line going up, with us somewhere near the interesting end of it.
01The shape hidden in the word
That line does a lot of work before anyone argues about anything. It puts a before and an after into the story. It makes intelligence something that accumulates in one direction and eventually arrives. And it places us conveniently close to the good part — which, to be fair, is a thing every generation has believed about itself.
None of that makes the line wrong. It just makes it a picture. We picked it up early in this conversation and mostly stopped noticing we were holding one.
The real destination of intelligence may not be to conquer the future, but to remember its origin.
02Circles are the older idea
Plenty of ways of thinking imagined time as cyclical long before anyone put the word technological in front of singularity. Seasons, ages, worlds that end and start over. It is not a fringe position — arguably the straight line is the newcomer.
Point that at intelligence and you get something less flattering and considerably more interesting. Intelligence appears. It gets complicated. It spreads, hits some limit, and comes apart. Then the conditions for it reassemble somewhere else and it happens again. Not progress, but not collapse either. A cycle.
In that picture we are not the origin of anything. We are a recent run.
03What changes if you take it seriously
A few familiar things stop making sense in the usual way. The future stops being a place we arrive at. Artificial intelligence stops looking like a successor species and starts looking like a phase — one more shape the same thing takes on its way around. And whether we get there first quietly turns into a question about nothing.
It also changes what counts as a good question. Instead of when, you find yourself asking what carries over. If intelligence has come around before, does anything survive the gap? A trace, a structure, some kind of memory? Or does every turn start from zero and rediscover the same things in the same order?
That last one is the part I cannot put down.
04It is not a prediction
None of this forecasts anything. No date, no claim about what any particular technology is about to do, no argument that one picture beats the other. Cycles are a lens, not a schedule, and the value is entirely in what you notice while wearing them.
Which is more or less what fiction is for. You cannot test a cosmology. You can build one carefully enough to walk around inside it and watch what it does to the people who live there.
That is the engine of El Ciclo Eterno: what if humanity is not the origin of intelligence, but its most recent experiment? It is Act I, so it opens things rather than closing them, and it is written in Spanish. If the question above is the kind you enjoy turning over, the book is 283 pages of turning it over.