The Intelligence Explosion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK5w3wh4G-M

I believe most people who think and talk about the AI intelligence explosion, don't understand that we are already in the middle of a human society intelligence explosion. Every advancement in communication and travel, has expanded humanity's effective intelligence and rate of technological improvement, by reducing waste in effort.

Previously, separate towns, due to lack of communication might each spend time developing the same technologies. As communication ranges increased, one town's technological development could benefit other towns, letting them spend time making new inventions or improvements instead of having to reinvent what the other town already made.

Each expansion of communication range, expanded the effective intelligence of humanity, and enabled faster and faster advancement. Now, with the internet, the range any new technology or discovery can reach is nearly global (large portions of the world are still too poor to gain much benefit). It's easy to see from looking at history, that advancements in technology and communication keep getting faster.

Humans and AIs are not separate things. Every step along the path to creating strong AI is a new tool we integrate into our own use, becoming an aid to our effective intelligence, speeding up the creation of more and better devices or programs. The first strong AI's won't be able to get loose and self-improve faster than we can keep up with, because it will be in a world where it is surrounded by powerful tools and weak AIs developed for human use. It would first have to either develop it's own tools, or figure out how to use tools that were never designed for it to use. That would give humanity a pretty big head start, plenty of time to figure out how to integrate the new AIs into our toolkit such that they become an extension of ourselves, just like our phones and search engines already are.