Philosophies & Movements
Takeoff (hard / FOOM, soft, Hansonian slow)
How fast AI might go from roughly human-level to far beyond it. A hard takeoff, nicknamed FOOM, means days or weeks, usually because an AI improves its own design in a runaway loop. A soft takeoff means years, giving people time to react. The slow view associated with economist Robin Hanson expects gradual, economy-wide growth spread across many systems and firms rather than one system racing ahead.
Origin
The idea traces to I. J. Good's 1965 "intelligence explosion" essay. The hard-versus-soft framing and the "FOOM" label come from the 2008 online debate between Eliezer Yudkowsky (fast) and Robin Hanson (slow) on the Overcoming Bias blog, later collected by MIRI as The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate. Sam Altman's 2025 essay The Gentle Singularity argues for a gradual takeoff.