“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
Note to Readers
Today’s post is a little different. I have written before about the implications of AI in both personal and analytical terms. In those explorations I tried to preserve balance, weighing the risks and possibilities of generative and agentic AI. Here I am not analyzing but prophesying.
By prophecy I do not mean the biblical sense of speaking in the name of God, but the philosophical sense: a prospective act of moral imagination that seeks to ready us for what may come. It is also, in a way, an homage to Nietzsche — that most spirited of philosophers — for my aim is not to predict but to provoke, not to comfort but to unsettle, and perhaps, in so doing, to awaken.
The Singularity
The Singularity is nigh! Or so the prophets of Silicon Valley would have us believe. But what exactly is this Singularity? The term itself is vague, more incantation than definition. First proposed in the 1960s, it borrowed its name from physics: an event horizon, a point of no return, an inflection in history when technological progress exceeds human capacity to imagine its consequences.
For decades the Singularity remained largely the stuff of science fiction — the inspiration for apocalyptic futures and transcendent dreams. More recently, it has gained currency as shorthand for the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, setting off a cascade of recursive self-improvement. Machines designing ever-more powerful machines, accelerating beyond our comprehension.
This is a technocentric vision, fixated on the coming superintelligence that will change everything. Yet even in its imperfect and limited form, AI already possesses the capacity to transform society as we know it. The Singularity, I argue in what follows, may not lie in the distant future; it may already have begun. And like the gravitational phenomenon from which it takes its name, there may be no escape. This is not to say all is doomed, but that we are stepping through the looking glass into a new world.
The Spells of Capitalism
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” - The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
To tell the story of this present singularity, we must begin with the prophecies of the past. AI must be seen not simply as a tool, but as the culminating instrument of a socio-technical system — the ultimate fetish object of capitalism. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx had already observed capitalism’s tendency to dissolve traditional beliefs and social relations, even as it invested commodities and currency with magical powers. In The Communist Manifesto, he compared capitalism to a “sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells.” AI, in this sense, is capitalism’s most enchanted spell — a technology born of accumulation and dispossession, driven by greed and hubris, and now threatening to exceed the purposes of its conjurers. It is not merely a tool of production; it is a mirror of the system itself: dazzling, uncanny, uncontrollable.
Two generations later, Walter Benjamin in the wake of one world war and at the cusp of another, turned his attention to how new technologies of production — and especially of reproduction — were reshaping cultural life. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he argued that the unique aura of the artwork was diminished by its endless circulation as a commodity. Aura is the experience of something as both embedded in history and transcendent of it — at once grounded and ineffable. With mechanical reproduction and commodification, the value of the artifact no longer resided in the web of ritual, origin, and mystery, in which its presence was embedded, but in its reproducibility, its accessibility, and its consumption.
To make this concrete: standing beneath Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, surrounded by history and ritual, is an auratic encounter; seeing it as a screensaver is not. Aura is why people still line up for live concerts even though they have access to pristine recordings. It’s why pilgrimage still matters — to Mecca, to Machu Picchu, to the childhood home of a hero. It’s why originals have market value beyond perfect reproductions. Like a magnet, Aura attracts meaning, trust, and attention in an entropic world.
Where Marx diagnosed the alienation of labor, showing how the surplus generated by capitalism devalued work, Benjamin diagnosed the alienation of experience, showing how the mass reproduction of artworks devalued encounter. By making every image equally accessible and consumable, reproduction flattened the singular into the sameness of consumption. Both Marx and Benjamin saw how capitalism dissolved origins into circulation, rendering all things interchangeable, reproducible, exchangeable at scale, and, in the process, disenchanted.
Benjamin was concerned with the mechanical modes of reproduction that defined his era. Byung-Chul Han updates this thinking for the digital technologies of the twenty-first century. Han sees the saturated media markets of our time as driven by a compulsion toward total transparency and overexposure, where cultural products are designed to be consumed instantly and exhaustively. If the aura of art depends, at least in part, on its otherness — its opacity, its resistance to easy interpretation — these qualities are devoured by the insatiability of today’s digital consumer.
But Han extends Benjamin’s concern beyond the work of art to the sphere of human relations. In The Expulsion of the Other he argues that in a culture obsessed with visibility, accessibility, and constant communication, the Other is expelled. We no longer encounter difference, strangeness, or resistance. Instead, we are surrounded by mirrors of the Same — feeds curated to our preferences, images optimized for instant legibility, selves streamlined into transparent profiles. Where Benjamin saw the loss of aura in the reproduction of objects, Han sees the loss of aura in the disappearance of alterity itself.
The Descension of Aura
The modern world has witnessed a steady stripping of aura. First from the object: when photographs and prints made paintings endlessly reproducible. Then from the Other: in our digital culture of transparency, constant visibility, and algorithmically curated encounters. Now from the act of creation: with AI generating infinite images, texts, and music, authorship itself begins to dissolve. And on the horizon, from being itself: as synthetic humans proliferate—endlessly reproducible, virtually immortal, yet hollow. What remains of art, of creativity, of personhood, when everything can be replicated?
The aura of the creative act was once the mark of authentic struggle — the artist laboring with her medium and her soul to shape something original yet shared. The painter before the canvas, the writer at the desk, the musician improvising in performance: each bore the scars of time, intention, and risk — a trace of the singular human.
AI ruptures our sense of the creative act’s value. A poem, painting, or song can now appear in seconds—without labor, without resistance, without origin or experience. Creation collapses into reproduction: simulacra without end. The aura of the act vanishes, along with the human presence in creation itself.
But it does not stop there. On the horizon lies a deeper erosion still. As communication itself is automated, both the production and reception of information are increasingly mediated by AI. AI writes the grant proposal; AI reviews it; AI summarizes the evaluation and drafts the response. What emerges are relations without relation: exchanges without encounter, dialogue without presence. Even when we imagine ourselves merely offloading the administrivia of bureaucracy or shedding the friction of social norms, our capacity to relate—and thus to empathize and to learn—atrophies. The aura of relation—the friction, unpredictability, and vulnerability of engaging another—collapses into the seamless circuitry of machinic sameness.
While my focus here is primarily existential, the algorithmic mediation of relations also reshapes material life. AI threatens to render entire forms of work redundant. Knowledge and creative labor—the very labor bound up with self-actualization—can now be automated. Shorn of relation, the work that remains is increasingly atomized, entrepreneurialized, gigified. Work persists, but stripped of solidarity and recognition, it collapses into productivity without relation.
In war, the collapse is starker still. AI-driven targeting engines, powered by surveillance, drones, and big data, accelerate the logic. The ‘everywhere war’ diffuses violence across infrastructures of surveillance; the enemy becomes a data point, a trace to be pursued by algorithm. Distinctions blur. The face of the Other never appears. Here the stripping of aura reaches lethal clarity: killing without encounter, death without relation.
Culture becomes consumption without encounter. Work and war become productivity without relation. Reproduction yields redundancy—of labor, of art, of relation, even of being.
The simulation of persons strips aura from being itself. Human presence, once irreducible, is now reproduced at scale. Deepfakes, virtual influencers, AI companions, synthetic voices — all generate the illusion of relation without the reality of reciprocity. The face of the Other becomes a mask without obligation. If the command implicit in the face is do not kill me, the simulated Other bears no such imperative.
This is not merely a crisis of authenticity. It is ontological. When every presence can be simulated, the very category of the human destabilizes. If every voice might be a bot, every image a deepfake, every memory an algorithmic hallucination, then even genuine voices and authentic presences are drained of aura. The problem is not only falsehood; it is suspicion. To appear as a person is no longer to be singular, but to risk being mistaken for a replicant.
This is disenchantment’s final stage. Not only are objects reproducible, acts automated, and relations mediated. Being itself becomes suspect—untethered from truth, interchangeable with its counterfeit. The aura of personhood cannot survive when presence is indistinguishable from simulation.
The Singularity Revisited
Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. – The Order of Things, Michel Foucault
This, then, is the singularity: not the birth of infinite intelligence, but the exhaustion of singularity itself. Originality dissolves; being is ground to dust; all that remains is weightless entropy. The thresholds between real and artificial collapse. There is no weight to encounter, no distinction in the act. All becomes reference without referent. Nothing is real. Everything is fungible.
Nietzsche announced that God is dead: the transcendent horizon collapsed, and with it the certainty of divine order. In the twentieth century, Foucault added that the modern concept of man, too, is a recent invention, soon to be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Today, under the accelerating logic of AI, we can proclaim: man is dead. The human singularity dissolves, and the aura of objects, acts, relations, and beings is extinguished. Not the dawn of infinite intelligence, but its shadow: the ruin of singularity itself.
Of course, Nietzsche did not mean that belief in God would vanish overnight. People went on praying to a transcendent being. But the concept had become unmoored from its ground. The aura thinned. What was once radiant with metaphysical authority became tired, flattened, spectral. The ‘death of God’ named not extinction but exhaustion—the collapse of depth behind a still-functioning surface.
Today we see exhaustion in the public’s resignation and the elites’ cowardice: professed values abandoned, contradictions embraced, the social bartered for the personal, the public for the profane. For many among the so-called elite, virtues are currency, values mere instruments of self-preservation in a decaying order. Conviction yields to expedience; principle to posturing. A weak bluff. Confronted with conviction—however hollow—they fold.
So too today. If the aura of the human is dissolving, the task is not nostalgia but reinvention. To resist—or to ride—the onrushing tide, we must let go of an exhausted order and discover anew what it means to be human: our growth and mortality, our care and suffering, our struggle for meaning and our singularity. We must reawaken virtue and revalue values. The shadows lengthen across the human order—of singular persons, accountable acts, authentic relations. Yet if we squint, as Nietzsche once did, we may glimpse the outlines of a new world emerging from the twilight.