The Economic Singularity is the destination at the end of all of this.
I borrowed the term from physics, where a singularity is the point at which a function goes to infinity and the normal rules of the system cease to apply. The classic example is the centre of a black hole, where the laws of relativity break down. I use it more specifically. The Economic Singularity is the moment when the economic models we have used for the last two hundred and fifty years simply stop working.
Not because the economy fails. Because the economy accelerates past the point at which our instruments can measure it.
The trigger is the collapse in the marginal cost of intelligence. For all of recorded history, intelligence has been scarce and expensive. Every business model, every pricing system, every compensation structure has been built on that scarcity. We are now in the first period in human history where the supply of intelligence is rising exponentially while the cost of producing each marginal unit is collapsing toward zero. When that line crosses, everything built on top of it has to be rebuilt.
Most people misread this as a doom story. AI replaces workers, demand collapses, the economy contracts. That framing is wrong. We are not subtracting humans from the economy. We are adding billions of new economic participants, AI agents and robots, each one producing output, consuming energy, transacting, paying for services, generating data. This is not a contraction. It is an explosion.
The traditional GDP formula, population plus productivity plus debt, was built for a world in which all economic actors were human. The new formula has to include synthetic labour, energy density and compute efficiency as first-class variables. The moment the synthetic side of that equation outweighs the human side, every measurement system we currently rely on goes dark at the same time.
My best estimate of when this happens sits between 2030 and 2032. Multiple independent models, built from completely different starting points, converge on that window. Adoption curves point to it. Debt cycles point to it. Demographic transitions point to it. Generational cycles point to it.
The Exponential Age describes the road. The Economic Singularity is where the road runs out and a new map has to be drawn. The contract between capital, labour and value has to be rewritten from first principles, and that conversation has barely begun.