Signal Why Do We Need Social Singularity? A Mechanism-Based Critique of Gradual Scenarios in AI Existential-Risk Discourse

Summary

Petr O. Jedlicka published a paper on arXiv (cs.CY) on August 4, 2026, critiquing recent gradual and cumulative AI existential-risk scenarios for remaining insufficiently sociologically specified despite their substantive contributions. The paper argues these scenarios lack a reflexive perspective, retain a largely technologically deterministic structure, and underestimate the role of collective agency and other social processes, causing them to discount the possibility of major social conflict accompanying AI diffusion and limiting their overall plausibility. Jedlicka identifies social mechanisms likely to become significant before or during AI deployment, including interpretive and performative dynamics, mobilization and countermobilization, path dependence and lock-in, cross-regime divergence and multi-speed diffusion, and social-psychological mechanisms such as attachment and reactance. The paper proposes a novel analytic distinction between technological singularity, a putative technological threshold in AI development, and social singularity, a social discontinuity produced by the anticipated approach of that threshold. The central implication is that the most consequential disruptions may emerge not only from advanced AI itself but from social dynamics provoked by expectations of its arrival.