Preface

The genesis of this book is a story of my personal journey. In mid-2024, I began thinking seriously about AGI and talking regularly with the large language models then available. I brought ideas to the conversations and we brainstormed together. Over time, a theoretical structure emerged. These exchanges appeared in Champaign Magazine, first as dialogues, then as installments of the Gradual AGI series. They supplied the backbone and flesh for this monograph.

Inside the pages is a conceptual model for an ongoing process we call Gradual AGI. Our point is that the realization of AGI is not only about breakthroughs in technical capability measured by benchmark scores, but also about a profound and prolonged transformation of society and civilization.

Recursive self-improvement and a possible intelligence explosion are much discussed these days. If autonomous RSI arrives, will our thesis still apply? I hope it will. AI systems may advance by orders of magnitude and at digital speed, but the world they act on is still bound by physical laws, biological clocks and institutional conventions. How these constraints shape that transformation is what our framework is designed to examine. Time will tell how well our propositions hold up.

W.H.L.
October 2026