The Pace of AI Acceleration

Every prior wave of computing progress eventually produced a stable plateau long enough for society to build institutions around it. The internet took the better part of two decades to generate meaningful regulation. Mobile computing had a comparably long runway.

Artificial intelligence, as this book will show in granular detail, has not offered that runway. The distance between a laboratory finding and a deployed capability with real-world consequences has compressed dramatically, and independent trackers now estimate that the rate of frontier capability growth itself has roughly doubled since 2024. And will accelerate in the future.

Unless......

This creates a peculiar problem for anyone trying to write, legislate, or plan around the technology: the target does not merely move, it accelerates.
A regulatory threshold calibrated with a comfortable two-year buffer can find itself crossed in twelve months. A safety commitment written when a company's most capable model could not act autonomously for more than a few minutes can become obsolete when the next model can act autonomously for days.