Exponential growth: deceptively slow at first, then alarmingly fast. Place one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on. How much rice do you need in total for all 64 squares? Take a moment to imagine it. What does your gut say? Now the answer: you need 370 billion tonnes of rice — roughly 670 times current global production.
Halfway across the board, the total is “only” 43 tonnes. Futurist Ray Kurzweil uses the phrase “the second half of the chessboard” to describe the point at which the speed of exponential growth becomes truly felt in technological development. That is where we are now with generative AI. It means our intuition fails us. That developments move so fast that an opinion on AI has a shelf life of at most six months. That our collective imagination is entirely inadequate to see what is coming, leaving us purely reactive in the moment.
For me, 2025 was the year the AI acceleration became tangible. Language models like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT grew steadily more powerful, and AI agents emerged. Software developers saw their daily work change completely; freelancers in the creative sector — translators, photographers, designers — began losing commissions.
So what are we to do? How do we ensure this revolution works for people, society and nature? That its costs and benefits are distributed fairly? Too much is at stake to let this wash over us passively. It demands reflection — in education, in businesses, across society at large.