Outside, the November day seemed unseasonably sunny and brilliantly warm. Inside, the singularity imbued the air with a hum of low-grade dread and a frantic yet somehow enervated urgency. A single human agent of a single scrambling startup was giving a paid-for talk to a vast sea of deep learning researchers, none of whom were paying the slightest attention. Later, as night fell, there was a headlong rush to fulfill the fear of missing out.

A great deal has happened since last pressing publish…