A reflection from Piedecuesta on the acceleration of artificial intelligence and the legal, ethical and business challenge of remaining accountable for its decisions.

☕ TECHLATTE: IDEAS WITH FOAM

What if the singularity were not an event, but a memory?

A few days ago, I stopped at a Terpel station in Piedecuesta. While my electric vehicle was charging, I ordered a cappuccino, opened my iPad and began reading the news.

In his essay The Gentle Singularity, Sam Altman wrote that we are already past the event horizon and that takeoff has begun. My immediate reaction was: what an exaggerated statement.

Five minutes later, I thought the opposite.

Not because I now believe an artificial intelligence more capable than all of humanity already exists, or that robots are about to rule us. I changed my mind because I realized that we may be imagining the singularity in the wrong way.

For years, we have waited for it like an eclipse: a precise moment everyone will witness at the same time. Technological revolutions do not work that way.

Nobody woke up one morning and said, Today the Internet began. Nor was there a single day when everyone understood that smartphones would transform how we work, shop, travel and relate to one another.

It simply happened. First, it was a novelty. Then a tool. Later, a necessity. One day, we discovered that we no longer knew how to live without it.

I believe the same thing is happening with artificial intelligence.

While we debate whether the singularity will arrive in five, ten or twenty years, AI already writes reports, develops software, analyzes contracts, interprets medical tests, creates marketing campaigns, negotiates with customers and coordinates agents that work with other agents.

The most surprising part is not that it performs all these tasks. It is that every month it performs them better than the month before.

For centuries, technology advanced because humans invented better tools. Today, tools are beginning to participate in the creation of even better tools. That shift may sound small. In reality, it changes everything.

The point is not that AI has already surpassed humanity. It is something more uncomfortable: the speed of technological progress may be surpassing our ability to understand it.

When that happens, the consequences appear not only in laboratories, but in companies, universities, governments and professions such as mine.

As a lawyer, I see organizations asking every week whether they should adopt artificial intelligence. In my view, that conversation is already behind us.

The real question is: who will be accountable for decisions made by an artificial intelligence system?

AI is no longer merely an experiment. It recommends credit, reviews contracts, detects fraud, screens candidates, drafts corporate policies and participates in decisions that until recently were exclusively human.

The greatest challenge is therefore no longer only technological. It is legal, ethical and organizational. I suspect many institutions have not yet understood that.

Perhaps twenty years from now, historians will debate the true beginning of the singularity. They may cite a new OpenAI model, an Anthropic innovation or a discovery we cannot yet imagine.

I think they may be looking for the wrong date. Great transformations rarely announce their arrival. We recognize them only when we look back.

As I finished my coffee, the charger indicated that the battery was full. I put away the iPad and continued my journey, but one thought remained with me.

Perhaps the day we can identify exactly when the singularity began will be the day we realize we have already been living inside it for years.

If that is true, the most important question is no longer when the future will arrive. It is whether we are evolving at the same pace.

☕ This coffee is served.

What do you think? Did Sam Altman exaggerate to spark debate, or was he simply the first to say aloud what was already happening in front of us?

Sources and recommended reading