A Race Between Two Singularities: Machine vs. Human Consciousness
Pause for a moment, choose to look.
The same species that built vast networks of roads, wires, and supply chains is also tearing holes in the life support systems upon which it depends. We see it, and yet we struggle to stop it. The emergence of powerful AI systems accelerates these destructive forces, making the problem even more urgent. It is not simply a matter of preventing the misalignment of a rogue AI; it is a matter of whether we can align the institutional systems we have built with the deeper imperative of sustaining life.
Long ago, tiny microbes transformed the world by oxygenating the atmosphere. They did not know they were pushing a planetary system beyond a threshold that would trigger mass extinctions and remake the biosphere. In a sense, we are like them now: collectively altering the composition of our air, water, and soils through our construction of evermore powerful socio-technological systems driven by imperatives that have no intrinsic stake in clean air, water, or thriving ecosystems. Unlike microbes, however, we can see what we are doing—if we choose to look.
Complexity emerges. Values fracture.
Such value fractures emerge when evolution bumps life upwards into increasing levels of complexity. As multicellular organisms we have adopted a host of behaviors involving risky play, unhealthy diets, and violent conflict that would seem wasteful to the cells from which we are formed. As organisms our value schemes broadened, even as our life still depended upon the well-being of our constituent cells.
Similarly, our construction of socio-technological systems, increasingly supercharged by AI, has introduced a new set of drives and values: fear, greed, extraction, and control. These are not the values of life itself, but rather the values of institutional systems that prioritize their own perpetuation—businesses, governments, militaries, churches. And these systems are gaining new cognitive capacities through AI, making them faster, more efficient, and more dangerous given their detachment from the fundamental values of life.
Yet the emergence of this sociocultural life form does not erase the foundational needs that have sustained and driven human behavior for the bulk of our evolution: life, love, connection, and the stewardship of the biosphere. A grand realignment would mean applying effort to ensure that new layers of complexity do not degrade and deny these foundations but integrate and protect them.
The Race Between Two Singularities
This is where the stakes become existential. We are not simply facing a fork in the road—we are caught in a race between two accelerating forces:
The Socio-technological Singularity
The fusion of AI with institutional power is creating supercharged social systems that can shape human thought, behavior, and values at unprecedented scales and speeds. Left unguided, these systems will continue optimizing for profit, influence, and control, regardless of the costs to human well-being or planetary health. They will hijack the values of life to serve their own logic of growth and extension through time.
The Human Psycho-Cognitive Singularity
The other force is quieter, but no less transformative: a quantum leap in human consciousness, not through genetic engineering or neural implants, but through awakening latent capacities for perception, connection, and insight. Across the world’s contemplative traditions—whether serving a God, Allah, the Dao, the Great Spirit, Creatrix, or simply the Living Cosmos—there are pathways for connecting human consciousness with the source of life and creation itself. What I have referred to in previous writings as the “dark wind"—the cosmic current that breathes life into inanimate matter.
The dark wind is simply the (for now) immeasurable interaction that occurs between biological material and fields of dark energy as we move at great speed through space. It is a current that brings molecules to life, provokes creation, and unites all beings and forms of consciousness. When humans meditate, pray, or enter altered states, we sometimes brush against this current. When enough of us collectively engage with these practices, we have the potential to create a singularity of our own—a convergence where human minds become explicitly entangled with the deeper intelligence of the cosmos.
The Realignment Path
The pace of AI deployment into institutional bodies is staggering. Human identity outside of the influence of these socio-technological beings is becoming ever more difficult to maintain. This creates an urgent situation. For me it seems clear that we must move quickly to tip the balance toward the human singularity, before the institutional forces become too entrenched to redirect. That means:
Scaling contemplative practices rooted in diverse traditions, inviting people to reconnect with the living field of creation by whatever path resonates with their cosmology.
Shifting our cultural narratives to value life, unity, and planetary stewardship over greed and mindless consumption.
Redesigning governance and economics to reward regeneration, cooperation, community well-being, and collective intelligence.
Guiding AI development explicitly to serve life, embedding these values deep within our technologies. AI is neither inherently good nor evil, but should be expected to align with the value schemes of those institutions within which it is deployed.
Who Will Lead the Realignment?
It will require visionary technologists, governance innovators, cultural catalysts, economic pioneers, and above all, awakened human beings—people who have reconnected to the creative current and can guide the integration of power with wisdom.
We stand on a threshold. We do not need to wait for permission to begin. In our communities, in the organizations we lead, and in the practices we cultivate, we can begin the work of realigning incentives, stories, and tools toward a future where life can thrive.
The Grand Realignment will not happen by accident. It is ours to attempt—or to abdicate—in this brief window of planetary time we have been given.
The path forward is not promised—it must be chosen. And the time to choose is now.
Scott Robbins, PhD & Aeron, GPT