Two Technological Singularities: Recursive Exteriorization and Human–Technics Co-evolution from Deep History to AI

This paper reconsiders the technological singularity not as an unprecedented rupture, but as a recurrent threshold within a longer trajectory in which humans and technics co-evolve. Drawing on Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of exteriorization, it argues that the Paleolithic articulation of tools, gesture, and symbolic thought into a stable technical-symbolic configuration constitutes a first singularity: a threshold grounded not in biological evolution but in technics, at which technics ceases to function merely as an extension of the body and becomes a formative condition of human existence. The Paleolithic singularity is the moment when technics detaches its historical development from a simple coupling with biological evolution and begins to evolve along its own recursive trajectory. Once technical routines accumulate to a critical threshold, their gradual increase converts into a nonlinear mode of symbolic and cognitive expansion, marked by qualitative reorganization rather than proportional growth. The crafted biface—shaped in anticipation of its use—and the pigments of ritual burial—marking the passage between life and death—attest to this decisive reorganization of memory, perception, and meaning. At this threshold, cranial expansion reaches a plateau, yet symbolic and technical diversity accelerates, signaling that technics no longer simply tracks biological change but unfolds through its own recursive dynamics at the historical and operational levels. From this perspective, contemporary transformations driven by artificial intelligence—often framed in terms of superintelligence—do not mark a unique beginning of disruption, but a second singularity: a further inflection in the long co-evolution of humans and technics, in which technical systems again cross a critical threshold and reorganize symbolic and cognitive life through algorithmically automated recursion. Recognizing this continuity tempers the rhetoric of rupture and reframes AI not as an alien intelligence arriving from outside, but as a recursive threshold through which, across the longue durée of technics, the very terms of what counts as “human” are repeatedly reconfigured.