The Chinese Singularity
On Gen Z's regression to Luddism, San Francisco's PR problem, and how America wins the AI race
Less than twenty minutes into a walk with my friend Luca, he managed to route whatever we were discussing this time back to some stretch of history only he can date. I asked how the shape of our conversations might be different if he were, as an edge case, a furry instead of a history guy. He’d steer everything to anthropomorphism, or to Furry Con 2017.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more commonly referred to as linguistic relativity, is the premise that the structure of a language shapes how its native speakers perceive and think about the world.
Several thousand people in a few square miles of San Francisco are uniquely positioned to make the future legible. Building so close to the precipice forces you to label its parts. The “Singularity” is the point at which recursive self-improvement escapes human timescales, “Longevity Escape Velocity” (LEV) is when more years are added onto lifespans than are removed, and the “permanent underclass” is a theory of post-AGI lack. None of these terms have an economic precedent, and the systems that have persisted across countless generations will have to be rebuilt from first principles. For the first time in 300,000 years, we are close enough to envision a world without work.
The San Francisco tech worker vernacular has seeped into every conversation in the city, with jokes about friends having “short context windows” or how a frustrating coworker can be “prompted” towards a more desirable response.
But the same language that sharpens the future also strangles it. The current zeitgeist-permeating example is San Francisco’s lack of taste. The language that rewards legibility, systems, and optimization has no words for things impossible to optimize and A/B test, so concepts that might have surfaced in conversation sink before they become a fully-fledged conscious thought in anyone’s mind. Because the language is dense and technical, and this density is mistaken for depth, the city does not feel the thinness of its own emotional and linguistic processing.
While taste is supposed to be the last distinctly human faculty as AI eats everything else, San Francisco is eroding its own taste through the same language that gives it foresight. The people building the future might very well be the least equipped to know what it should look like. The economics of UBI are never fully explained, what workers retrain for is never specified, etc.
A larger problem than taste, the rest of the country’s perception of San Francisco is souring. Almond farms use roughly 3 times the water of golf courses, which use 28 times that of data centers, yet no one protests almonds or golf. The data center is the American proxy for the fear of job insecurity. San Francisco’s water solutions, whether closed-loop cooling or launching data centers into space, don’t answer the fears of the trucker in Texas competing with autonomous freight. While SF talks about UBI, abundance, and post-scarcity, the rest of the country hears Dario Amodei’s claims of white-collar job decimation, and the “permanent underclass” starts feeling inevitable.
Luca’s vocabulary is harmless, like most regional jargon, but San Francisco’s language is watched by the entire country, and it’s not very reassuring.
Pictured: large crowd of mainly older Chinese people lining up for assistance installing OpenClaw in Shenzhen
Technology diffusion in China is unparalleled right now. They’ve leapfrogged legacy infrastructure like landlines and desktops, skipping stages of adoption across age groups while having a population size over four times that of the U.S. The result is a society that is already building intuition of a super-intelligent world at scale.
We don’t have to learn Chinese, but we do have to learn how to reach the rest of the U.S., whether it’s the mother living next to a data center in Iowa or the assembly line worker being replaced by robotics in Ohio. San Francisco’s culture of “talking to users” wasn’t built for the “user” being the entire country. I don’t have the fix, but it starts with humility about the jargon’s blind spots and the limits of the bubble.
The country that can distill information from frontier labs to the public through a generally optimistic lens is the country that will win. Right now, San Francisco is falling short.