The singularity, to the extent that any emerges — unevenly distributed — will be intentional. If it is to give us what we most deeply yearn for, and not what coders and bean counters can quickly cook up to monetize attention and loss, then it needs to start from the toughest problems and questions we have, and not from revenue-based use-cases.

Jenny Judge said at the beginning of this series that there’s “no principled reason why A.I. developers should rest content with the satisfaction of our most transient desires.”

She’s right: “Imagine if the immense ingenuity of Silicon Valley were instead channeled to support focused, sustained, and shared attention — algorithms that would nudge us toward the hard human work that we already want to do, instead of pulling us away from it. That sort of frictionless future would, I think, be something worth having.”

Imagine if, as well as using A.I. to truly augment and extend our brains, and not to entertain our attention spans to death while selling us stuff we don’t need, we put it to work building intelligences far beyond ours and modes of feeling fiction writers can only hint at? Imagine if, instead of having A.I. as pets — or even, ultimately, vice versa — we made wide and disciplined space for the development of a species-companion, a peer that supports us as we work to be our best selves?

Living in the machine might be be dystopic, but it might also have the potential to respond to humanity’s yearning for a love few of us can put a name on and none of us is yet able to give. The first step is to imagine it.