An 'intelligence explosion' will allow machines to make better machines.

In a 1965 essay [PDF], mathematician I. J. Good predicted that machines will eventually be able to create better machines.

His full quote:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the

intellectual activities of any man however clever.

Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

No less a mind than Stephen Hawking is freaked out by it.

If AI becomes better at designing AI than humans, we'll hit an intelligence explosion that "ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails," Hawking said in a recent Reddit AMA.