In mid-May Demis Hassabis told Google I/O that we might someday look back and see that we were now in the "foothills of the singularity." A lovely pastoral image carrying a payload of anemoia. Pure Sound of Music. Pack a light lunch, strap on your boots, and train for the glorious climb toward the peak of superintelligence.
Even if dressed as a warning, the metaphor betrays him: foothills says the hard part is ahead, and the heroes who are advancing to the peak are already worried enough on our behalf. The genius of the metaphor is that it relocates risk into the future. This terrain is solid; the danger lies ahead in the heroic push to the summit. Life here is merely preparatory.
Seeing our inability to handle the AI capabilities we already have, “foothills” feels too techno-optimistic, not to mention suspiciously motivated coming from the guys who own the land. I’ve been looking for the right topographic metaphors for our actual predicament, and the options are hilariously grim. No masochist, I had Gemini 3.5 Flash betray its creator by assisting the writing of what you read here.
If we absolutely must stick to the mountain theme, we should at least look at the actual hazards of alpine travel. Like crevasses.
A crevasse is a deep, invisible fracture hidden under a deceptively smooth layer of snow. You think you’re on a well-trodden trail to the summit, and then…bam! an entire economic sector or intellectual property framework falls into a bottomless crack overnight. One day you have a thriving industry of coders, copywriters, paralegals, and customer service reps; the next day, a structural rift opens up and swallows them before you can even look for a rope. A sudden, vertical drop into economic non-existence.
Or what about cliffs? Not cliffs we have to scale, but blind drop-offs we plunge over because we're walking in the dark. We are sprinting toward automation, entirely blind to the cliff-edge where capability ends and hallucination begins. We build systems around these models and drive straight off the edge of reality to plunge straight down into systemic failure before anyone realizes the machine lost its bearings ten miles back.
But even those are too clean. Let’s look at what else might lie before mountains.
Maybe it’s a minefield. An area where a single misstep detonates a latent systemic crisis: industrialized fraud, synthetic political movements, or the collapse of any shared notion of reality. But no, that’s not quite right. A minefield implies an enemy deliberately buried explosives to destroy us. We did this to ourselves, not deliberately but predictably, out of corporate enthusiasm and regulatory laziness. There was no enemy general. We scattered live ordnance in our own backyard and decided to play tag.
So maybe it’s a sinkhole plain instead. Karst topography (thanks, Gemini!). The surface looks perfectly solid, but the underlying bedrock of our legal frameworks, labor markets, regulatory controls, and information ecosystems has been undermined. These institutions were built on the implicit assumption of human friction: that filing a thousand-page fake lawsuit or mimicking a person's voice takes time and effort. By removing that friction, current AI hollows out the foundation. We keep walking forward assuming the ground will hold our weight. Keep automating activities that once required human judgment, and eventually critical institutions drop into the abyss.
But a sinkhole is too sudden. It doesn't capture the exhaustion of dealing with the rising din. A quagmire? Not a challenging climb, but sinking to our necks in synthetic media clamoring for attention and autogenerated documents demanding review. We aren’t going to suddenly vanish; we'll slowly suffocate in a swamp of abundant slop.
For something even less cheerful, we could call it a free-fire zone. A chaotic, exposed expanse where civilians have no institutional cover or regulatory high ground. Current tools are already optimized for weaponization by any random bad actor, leaving personal privacy and digital infrastructure exposed to hyper-charged collateral damage…as if things weren’t bad enough already.
My point, and I do have one, is that the foothills metaphor doesn’t merely understate the danger. It mislocates it. It frames AI safety as an engineering problem for the future, a challenge of controlling the god to be found at the summit. Meanwhile, down here in the badlands, we’re stumbling through a landscape ready to swallow us whole. The threat isn't the future climb or the thin air at the top. It’s that we're already knee-deep in quicksand, fantasizing about the view from a peak we may never live to see.