01What "intelligence explosion" means

The term comes from statistician I. J. Good in 1965. The idea: "A machine smarter than humans designs a machine smarter than itself, which designs another even smarter, and so on —" When that chain starts, intelligence grows at an accelerating rate.

For decades, this was a thought experiment. Since the 2023 generative-AI wave, it has been reassessed as "a near-future reality":

When AI can accelerate AI research itself, development reaches a speed that does not require human-hand intervention. That is the threshold.

02"When?" — what serious people actually predict

Major industry estimates:

What matters is that the industry's median estimate is "sooner than people expect". Living between "definitely will" and "definitely won't" — i.e., on the assumption that "there's a non-trivial chance, and possibly sooner than thought" — is the rational stance.

03Five structural changes to society

If intelligence explosion happens, the structure of society may shift in the following ways.

  1. Essential change in labor — most cognitive work (clerical, analytical, junior development, content generation) becomes replaceable. What remains for humans: not "what to do" but "for whom, and why"
  2. Concentration of power — countries, companies, and individuals with frontier AI gain unprecedented advantage. Those without lose competitiveness rapidly
  3. Collapse of timescales — progress outpaces the speed at which humans can adapt. Ethics, law, and social consensus cannot keep up
  4. Erosion of truth — high-quality fake videos, audio, and documents are mass-produced. The social ground for "what is real" wobbles
  5. Redefinition of wealth — material scarcity may be rapidly solvable. But "who benefits" becomes the new class question

04Daily life — imagine it concretely

Not abstractly. Picture a morning a few years after the threshold:

An AI assistant wakes you instead of the alarm. From last night's sleep data, it reports: "I've cut two of your meetings today."
The kids' homework is personalized by an AI tutor. The school report now includes "AI literacy" as a graded item.
At work, your "AI team" of five receives the morning brief. You confirm finished tasks and issue new instructions.
Lunch break, your mother calls: "I asked the AI to explain my health check-up — it said the following." Medical consultation through AI has become daily.
Evening news. Over half the articles carry an "AI-generated" label. The rest are the premium "human-written" tier.

In that landscape, people will probably hold both "things easier than now" and "things more restless than now". Materially richer, yet a constant pressure of one's role being redefined. Everyone confronts their own replaceability, every day.

05Family and relationships

Less discussed but important — how this shifts the family:

06Politics and democracy

More serious still: the impact on politics.

07What will happen in pharma and medicine

For our readers, the direct implications:

08What humanity should prepare — seven priorities

01

Invest in AI safety research

Technology to guarantee AI "works correctly" (interpretability, alignment) lags behind capability research. Human intellect must concentrate here.

02

International AI governance agreement

A framework like the NPT for AI. Full agreement is unlikely, but a minimum "must-not-do" list is essential.

03

Full redesign of education

From memorization to AI-fluency and AI-resistant judgment. School and university curricula rewritten within 5 years.

04

Rebuilt social safety net

When employment shifts abruptly, livelihood guarantees during transitions, retraining programs, and serious UBI discussion become necessary.

05

Individual AI literacy

Every individual gaining the capacity to use, understand, judge, and ethically handle AI. Not optional — a precondition of social participation.

06

Rediscover "what only humans can do"

Empathy, creative leaps, physicality, art, religion, philosophy. Deliberately cultivate domains AI cannot replace.

07

Preserve "the culture of waiting"

In an instant-everything era, deliberately preserve cultures that think in long time horizons (philosophy, long-range planning, traditional rituals).

09"Not preparing" is no longer an option

What I most want this essay to convey: "This doesn't concern me" / "Maybe it'll happen, but not in my lifetime" — I understand the wish to think this way. I myself, when healthy, considered patient-rights protection somebody else's problem.

But the intelligence-explosion question is of the kind where "by the time you notice, the structure has already changed". Inn towns before railroads, painters before photography, bookstores before the internet — only those who began preparing right before the structural change kept a place after it.

In closing

The exact probability of intelligence explosion, I don't know. Maybe tomorrow, maybe ten years, maybe never.

But "the probability is high enough that it can't be ignored" — that consensus in the industry is no longer movable. Given that, living on that premise is what rational adults do.

What AI news will say next week or month, I don't know. But for myself, my family, my workplace, "if it changes suddenly, what would I do?" — thinking about that now ── that, I believe, is the responsibility of those of us standing at the threshold.