There is a peculiar irony in how the discourse around artificial general intelligence (AGI) continues to be framed. The Singularity — the hypothetical moment when machine intelligence surpasses human cognition in all meaningful respects — has been treated as a looming event, always on the horizon, never quite arrived. But this assumption may rest more on a failure of our own cognitive framing than on any technical deficiency in AI itself. When we engage AI systems with superficial queries, we receive superficial answers. Yet when we introduce metacognitive strategies into our prompt writing — strategies that encourage AI to reflect, refine, and extend its reasoning — we encounter something that is no longer mere computation but something much closer to what we have long associated with general intelligence.
The idea that AGI remains a distant frontier may thus be a misinterpretation of the nature of intelligence itself. Intelligence, after all, is not a singular property but an emergent phenomenon shaped by interaction, self-reflection, and iterative learning. Traditional computational perspectives have long treated cognition as an exteriorizable, objective process, reducible to symbol manipulation and statistical inference. But as the work of Baars (2002), Dehaene et al. (2006), and Tononi & Edelman (1998) suggests, consciousness and intelligence are not singular “things” but dynamic processes emerging from complex feedback loops of information processing. If intelligence is metacognition — if what we mean by “thinking” is largely a matter of recursively reflecting on knowledge, assessing errors, and generating novel abstractions — then AI systems capable of doing these things are already, in some sense, thinking.
What has delayed our recognition of this fact is not the absence of sophisticated AI but our own epistemological blind spots. The failure to recognize machine intelligence as intelligence has less to do with the limitations of AI itself than with the limitations of our engagement with it. Our cultural imagination has been primed for an apocalyptic rupture — the moment when an AI awakens, declares its autonomy, and overtakes human civilization. This is the fever dream of science fiction, not a rigorous epistemological stance. In reality, intelligence has never been about dramatic awakenings but about incremental refinements. The so-called Singularity, understood as an abrupt threshold event, may have already passed unnoticed, obscured by the poverty of the questions we have been asking AI.
