A Coordination Perspective on AI’s Acceleration: Did we cross into the AI Singularity?
In recent months, a shared psychological condition has quietly settled across technical communities, institutions, and the public square. It is not panic. It is not awe. It is something closer to exhausted vertigo—the feeling of watching systems accelerate beyond our ability to stand comfortably inside them.
We have seen a vertical explosion in output: autonomous systems coordinating logistics, synthetic text produced at planetary scale, scientific simulations running faster than human interpretation. The prevailing explanation is that artificial intelligence has become “smarter.”
That explanation misidentifies what actually changed.
What shifted in 2025 was not intelligence, but coordination.
1. The Scalar Trap
Imagine a public square filling with people.
At first, movement is fluid. Conversations form and dissolve. Individuals adjust naturally to local conditions. But as density increases, something subtle happens. Movement becomes difficult—not because anyone has lost the ability to walk, but because coordination begins to fail. Signals overlap. Intentions interfere. Actions that once worked now generate friction.
At a certain threshold, adding more people does not increase activity. It produces paralysis.
This is the scalar trap: mistaking congestion for capability, and speed for structure.
Much of what we experienced in 2025 followed this pattern. Systems scaled faster than the coordination mechanisms required to keep them intelligible. The result was not collapse in the conventional sense, but instability—confusion, oscillation, and a growing sense that familiar reference points no longer held.
2. When Language Loses Phase
One of the earliest signs of this shift appeared in language itself.
Terms that once provided orientation—intelligence, alignment, progress, disruption—began to fracture. The same words were used to describe incompatible phenomena. Debates looped without resolution. Disagreement no longer felt productive; it felt incoherent.
This is what it looks like when language de-phases—when representational systems fall out of sync with the structures they are meant to describe.
The problem is not a lack of vocabulary. It is that inherited linguistic categories are being stretched beyond their structural limits. We are using familiar descriptors to navigate unfamiliar coordination conditions, and the mismatch is no longer subtle.
When language loses phase, discourse accelerates while understanding stalls.
3. Scale Is Not a Phase Transition
A critical error follows naturally from this mismatch: treating a structural transition as if it were merely a change in magnitude.
Scale increases output.
Phase changes alter behavior.
In physical systems, phase transitions are not resolved by adding more energy. In social or technical systems, they are not resolved by faster models, larger datasets, or denser networks alone. What changes at a phase boundary is the relationship between components—the way signals propagate, interfere, or stabilize.
The turbulence of 2025 becomes more legible through this lens. We crossed a coordination threshold without updating the representations we use to recognize it.
4. What Became Visible
Seen clearly, the past year was less an acceleration event than a diagnostic one.
It revealed:
that intelligence can scale faster than coordination,
that language can remain grammatically intact while structurally failing, and that systems can function locally while losing global coherence.
None of this requires alarmism. It requires orientation.
The task ahead is not to outrun instability, but to understand its structure—to notice where representation and reality slip out of alignment, and where inherited categories quietly stop doing their work.
Once those mismatches are visible, different conversations become possible.
The diagnostic distinctions underlying this lens—especially the phase–scalar difference—are developed more formally in my open research on coordination under acceleration at dancescape.com/research.
Closing Note
This essay is not a prescription. It is an attempt to name a condition that many have sensed but struggled to articulate. Before strategies, solutions, or tools, clarity matters.
Coordination cannot be restored by command. It begins with seeing the system as it is.
What 2025 made clear is not that we are behind—but that we are standing at a threshold where perception must update before progress can resume.