Singularity

The Reader, Mary Cassatt, 1877

 

Singularity.

It seems appropriate as a title of thought: singularity. After all, I am now working—really, living and breathing—policy and ethics when it comes to artificial intelligence.

But I have also become singular. My husband of nearly 30 years dumped me. He decided we were getting divorced without any consultation with me, without any chance for intervention, without any pause to listen to or hear me. When I went to bed the night of the pronouncement, my body wailed. The cries came deep from my solar plexus. It was the stuff of Greek mythology. He was scared.

The morning-after whiplash of self-reflection recognized that the marriage was an entanglement, a contrivance, a sham. It was confirmed when I overheard him on the phone in pillow talk with another and he later affirmed that he did not take our vows seriously.

The whirlwind was extraordinary. In a daze of survival of the fittest, I removed myself from decades-long commingling and returned to my old true self of independence as a downtown apartment dweller. The first night alone in my new apartment was marked by physical healing: pockets of pain and inflammation disappeared overnight. My entire physique transformed into a lean glow. I have become protean.

Singularity references infinite value in mathematics. Something without limits. While still compromised under the commingling with the promise breaker, I was mentally drafting an important scholarly essay. I couldn’t settle down to lay in bed to sleep and kept on getting up to take down notes of what was racing through my brain. I was proposing a dialectic of freedom. The promise breaker didn’t understand, he didn’t care, he didn’t want me to not be in bed. A month after removing myself from the clutch, I stayed up late to draft another important essay. This time it was on the relationship of professional values to ethics and choice. And this time I wandered freely through my home with my chosen music waxing the infinitude.

Singularity and infinite value are now mine.