The Intelligence Explosion February 26, 2026February 26, 2026 A.I. is going to eliminate most jobs. That’s not news. (See, e.g., Andrew Yang’s 2018 best-seller, The War On Normal People.) We need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all.* What’s new is how fast it’s happening. Matt Shumer writes: . . . I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave. Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect. I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week. But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter. The last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely. And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech . . . The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely. . . . [T]he gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing. Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. . . . Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely. In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54. By 2023, it could pass the bar exam. By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science. By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI. On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era. If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you. . . . Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.” Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started. You need to read this in full. He has suggestions on practical steps you should take right now. BONUS Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That. Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin has lost almost half its value. We have one question. What took so long? Worth reading in full. *Imagine if we could provide all the things humans actually need — food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. — without having to work much at all. With largely-free energy from the sun powering automated factories and robots to do most of the physical work humans now do, and A.I. to do the rest. Leaving us free to pursue hobbies and passions and social interaction and, well, more or less anything we want. As some retirees already do. This raises myriad practical, political, and philosophical questions — none of them original with me. And a lot of questions about the best way to invest. All suggestions welcome.