The Potential Runway Effect (Or Run Away effect) with AI
I have been thinking about this for a long time, but it feels like we are getting closer to it now.
What happens when AI can develop technology that is better than itself, almost instantly? And then that technology can do the same thing again. And again.
At that point, progress is no longer driven by humans sitting in rooms thinking things through. It becomes technology compounding on top of itself, moving into areas so far beyond human understanding that we struggle to even describe it properly.
That idea is what I think of as the runway effect.
Think about it like this - Imagine you were given the option to have a child whose IQ was just 10 points higher than your own. Nothing crazy. Just slightly smarter.
Now imagine that child grows up and does the same thing. And then their child does it again. It would not take many generations before everyone was as smart as Einstein. Not because of one massive leap, but because of small improvements stacking on top of each other.
Now here is the part that really matters - AI does not have to wait 9 months to be born and It doesn't have to wait 18 years to grow up. That entire cycle can happen in hours, days, or even minutes.
This idea is older than most people think
Interestingly, this theory is not new. It was first described back in 1965 by British mathematician I. J. Good, who coined the term intelligence explosion. He described a future where the first truly intelligent machine would be able to improve itself, and each improvement would make it better at improving the next version.
Once that loop starts, progress no longer happens at a human pace.
As he put it:
“The first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
And we are very nearly at that point now.
We underestimate development curves and leaps
Humans are very bad at understanding exponential change. We assume tomorrow will look like today, just a little bit better.
That works fine when progress is slow. It breaks completely once things start compounding.
For a long time, nothing seems to happen. Improvements feel incremental. Then the curve bends, and once it bends enough, it stops feeling manageable.
And this brings us to the runway analogy...
Think about a plane on a runway. At first it is moving, but it does not look impressive. You can watch it speed up and still think nothing dramatic is happening. It feels controlled. Predictable.
Then there is a point where enough speed has built up that the plane lifts off. From that moment on, you are no longer dealing with a slow increase. You are airborne, technology behaves the same way.
Why AI changes everything
Every major technology shift in history still relied on humans to drive the next step. Humans invented, refined, tested, and repeated the process.
AI changes that loop. Once AI becomes good at improving the systems that create intelligence, the cycle tightens. AI helps design better models and inventions. Those models help design the next version faster. The time between breakthroughs collapses.
Humans are still involved, but we are no longer setting the pace or the outcome in some instances.
Speed becomes the real disruption
The biggest impact will not be that AI is intelligent. It will be how fast everything moves once this loop closes.
When iteration happens in hours instead of years, technology leapfrogs itself, skills become outdated faster than people can adapt, Long term planning becomes less useful than the ability to respond quickly
and progress stops feeling gradual. It starts feeling sudden. and problems we have struggled to solve as a human race are solved in minutes..
This is not movie stuff anymore
We are very nearly there. This is not about saying the world ends tomorrow, and it is not about fear - It could be a good thing.
It is about recognising that once a system can meaningfully improve itself, the shape of progress changes. By the time it feels obvious, the take off has already happened.
History is full of examples where change looked slow until it suddenly was not - for example the industrial revolution (all be-it we were still the inventors.)
The real question is not when this happens. It is whether our businesses, careers, education systems, and expectations are built for a world where the pace of change does not slow back down.
Because once technology & invention takes off, you do not get to ask it to slow down for comfort and this loop could be continuous.
It's something to think about...
I keep coming back to this idea because once you see the curve, you see it everywhere.
The runway effect is not about AI hype. It is about acceleration. And acceleration always looks harmless right up until the moment it lifts off.
So what could that actually look like? A cure for cancer found in seconds instead of decades, living far longer than we ever thought possible, limitless clean energy that makes today’s arguments feel outdated.
Or maybe all of that at once and then maybe things far beyond it that we cannot even describe yet.
Once technology starts compounding on top of itself, the outcomes are not just faster versions of what we already know. They are entirely new categories of progress & invention that sit well outside what the human brain is used to understanding.
And if history is any guide, once take off happens, those changes would not arrive slowly over generations, they could arrive within years.
When it happens, it will not feel gradual, It will feel like take off.