Sam Altman has claimed that humanity has moved beyond the "event horizon" and that the technological take-off has begun, arguing in his essay "The Gentle Singularity" that systems already exist that are smarter than people in many domains and that digital superintelligence is within reach. The more useful question for governments and large organisations is whether the assumptions on which modern institutions were built would survive if the singularity did arrive. In the artificial-intelligence context, the singularity means a point at which machine intelligence accelerates scientific discovery, software development and its own improvement so rapidly that human institutions can no longer reliably predict or absorb the pace of change. Most public institutions and major companies were designed around scarcity, slow information, periodic planning and hierarchical decision-making. Stanford’s 2025 AI Index reported that 78 per cent of organisations used AI in at least one business function in 2024, up from 55 per cent a year earlier, with generative-AI use rising from 33 per cent to 71 per cent. US private AI investment reached $109.1 billion, compared with $9.3 billion in China and $4.5 billion in the UK. PwC estimates that broad AI adoption could raise global output by as much as 15 percentage points by 2035. McKinsey found that 78 per cent of surveyed organisations were using AI in 2024, but only 21 per cent of those using generative AI had fundamentally redesigned at least some workflows, and only