Beyond the Singularity Myth: Artificial General Intelligence as Cumulative Infrastructural Transformation—Absorption Capacity, Epistemic Drift, and the Erosion of Human Verification Power

The dominant framing of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a discrete breakthrough obscures the more urgent reality: AGI is arriving as a gradual, cumulative erosion of human verification power distributed across institutions and decision-making systems. This article reframes the AGI transition through the lens of absorption capacity; that is, the rate at which human systems can integrate, govern, and maintain meaningful oversight of increasingly autonomous AI. Drawing on empirical observations from deploying enterprise-scale generative AI in a large public university and personal experiences as a long-standing AI researcher and educator, in this article, I identify three critical asymmetries characterizing this transition: (1) governance lag, where policy cycles cannot match technological iteration speed; (2) institutional misalignment, where locally rational AI systems produce collectively irrational societal outcomes; and (3) capability inequality, where uneven access to AI amplifies structural advantage. I argue that the defining challenge is not achieving technical alignment with human values, but maintaining epistemic authority, which is the human capacity to verify, understand, and steer systems reasoning in latent spaces beyond direct audit. The article concludes that the true measure of preparedness for AGI is not computational power or algorithmic sophistication, but adaptive governance: institutional architectures capable of co-evolving with the technologies they must regulate. The frontier is not artificial superintelligence. It is collective human capacity to remain intelligible to ourselves while embedded in AI-mediated decision ecosystems.