Introducing The Watershed
Hello, folks. It's been a while. This 'monthly' newsletter took a break late last year, and just sort of never came back. It never will.
'The Good Thing' was a great way to keep people connected to interesting things.
It's no longer needed. Suddenly the whole world is interesting.
Because of The Watershed.
Between mid-November and early December 2025 something fundamentally changed. Specifically, we passed through a watershed moment - when artificial intelligence got “good enough”. The best way to understand this is that we went from asking "what can it do?" to asking, "What can't it do?"
The answers to that question are important and nuanced because the Watershed transforms everything in its path. Now that artificial intelligence is “good enough” we are at the early stages of a re-valuation of everything digital. Not just software. Not just hardware. Not just processes. Not just organisations and businesses and institutions and governments. Everything digital. We have spent the last 50 years digitising. And everything that has been touched by that is now changing.
That's why The Good Thing has become The Watershed. To explore the new baseline that we are all now operating from.
Now, I need to openly and transparently admit that I am going to break a promise I made when you signed up for "The Good Thing" - that it will only arrive monthly.
The Watershed will arrive as often as it needs to. Once this week, twice next week. Whenever I have something to share about what's happening. And there's a lot happening.
While I would hate to see you go, this may not be the newsletter or cadence you signed up for. If that's the case, I urge you to unsubscribe. No harm, no foul: I've changed the rules and that's your opportunity for a graceful exit.
But if you're interested in learning what's happening now and what's coming next, draw near. There's a lot here to explore, starting with this excerpt from Monday's newsletter, "Peri-singular"...
Gradually, then Suddenly
The day I met Vernor Vinge we went to dinner in the company of my good friend David Baxter. We had an ulterior motive: David wanted to secure the rights to Vernor’s True Names to write a screenplay — and make a motion picture. As an expert in the virtual world, I’d been invited to work on the script.
While I was thrilled to be able to work on True Names, I had other reasons to have a deep conversation with Vernor. Well aware of his 1993 paper for NASA, The Coming Technological Singularity, I wanted to ask him what he thought about how we had been tracking in the half-dozen years since he’d written it.
We went deep, with recent developments in nanotechnology, virtual reality, machine learning — he stayed current with the research — and somewhere in the back-and-forth, he suddenly came to a conclusion, roaring out at me, “You’re a GRADUALIST!”
I knew immediately what he meant. His theory of a Technological Singularity posits an exponentially-increasing technological capability that achieves a blink-of-an-eye ‘takeoff’, accelerating well beyond human capabilities. And human understanding.
It’s not that I’ve ever doubted that thesis; I’ve just wondered what a ‘blink-of-an-eye’ actually looks like when you’re situated in the midst of it. Things that in the geological record look nearly instantaneous (such as the Permian-Triassic boundary, bringing extinction to 85% of species) took tens of thousands to millions of years. Even the sorts of environmental collapse associated with impactors such as Chicxulub — which did for all the dinosaurs except the birds — aren’t truly immediate except in the immediate vicinity of the impact.
Things, in short, take time.
I can not see any reason why the technological singularity would be any different. When viewed through a geological lens, it might appear to be here-today-gone-tomorrow, but that’s an artefact of the sampling rate. Day-to-day, minute-by-minute it seems unrealistic that any process essentially physically-based would or even could be so rapid. The world simply doesn’t move that way.
While there are moments of phase transition, they reveal a new order, rather than encompassing the change: all the elements must be in supersaturation for the phase transition to occur. It seems sudden only because the entire prologue has completed its necessary setup.
None of which is to undercut Vernor’s basic thesis — a Technological Singularity appears inevitable. That assertion was true before he wrote it, and remains true now that he’s gone. What remains contestable is what that Singularity actually looks like from within it. Because that’s right where we find ourselves.
We inhabit a moment in time of indefinite duration, between a time when a technological singularity was literally unthinkable and a time when it will be impossible to conceive of anything else. We are ‘peri-singular’, in the midst of Big Things, trying to work out where this is all going.
And because I asserted that we would have a reasonably long run-up to “The Great Surprise” of the Technological Singularity, Vernor pronounced me a ‘Gradualist’. I didn’t disagree at the time, and I still hold that view.
But in 2026, as the rate of change becomes so great it begins to confound any capacities we have to manage it, my views have become more nuanced. Peri-singular isn’t a single thing. It’s a gradient between not-so-much and utterly overwhelmed.
As to where we are right now, Vernor would not be surprised: every day, more overwhelmed.
Until Monday,
Mark