Been thinking about and discussing AI lately and realized that some day machines will run the world.  However, it's not gonna happen necessarily as you'd expect.  Here goes.

1. Plants evolve and beget animals
2. Animals evolve and beget apes
3. Apes evolve and beget primitive man
4. Up until now, everything is pretty damn stupid
5. Primitive man advances in intelligence and discovers language, enabling the sharing of intelligence / experience / wisdom
6. Language begets literacy, speeding the spread of intelligence across mankind
7. Differentiation occurs and fewer and fewer thinkers influence more and more people through printed books and then other forms of media
8. The information superhighway emerges, accelerating this differentiation by enabling an ever smaller set of intellectual luminaries to hugely impact the knowledge and thinking of a growing segment of society (think wikipedia and blogs)
9. Machine learning aka artificial intelligence starts to take hold as manifested by advanced search and other information retrieval applications.  This is where things get interesting...
10. Machines are trained to be intelligent by humans labeling "truth sets" for the machines via openmind.org, cyc.com, and lately ala the likes of Google's image labeling game.  These machines then do a small fraction of simple things for humans such as search for pictures or translate languages.
11. Of course, machines can only be as smart as their trainers, so the set of trainers becomes more exclusive.  To train a machine with 20-year old intelligence, college students must be recruited.  This enables machines to help the common man understand why there are only 8 planets in our solar system or whether or not he should buy a product based on the machine's understanding of his historical needs and behavior.
12. Of course, to train even smarter machines, smarter trainers are needed.  PhDs are recruited.  This only goes so far, so the bar for trainers rises to include only PostDocs, then only professors, then only influential thought leaders, and so on until only Nobel Laureates are allowed to train machines.  Now the machines can do everything that 99.99999% of mankind can do (propose a unified field theory, compose muscial masterpieces, and solve world hunger).
13. In turn 99.99999% of mankind is freed from the chores and responsibilities of regular life and can relax and enjoy the entertainment that flows freely now from YouTube, MySpace, etc.
14. Finally, when all the Nobel Laureates have fully transferred their insights to the machines, there's nothing left to do.  Mankind trusts itself fully to the machines and even the Nobel Laureates can just sit back and party!

In summary:

1. Society arises
2. Normal people influence other normal people
3. Smart people influence more normal people, lowering the need to think by normal people
4. Very smart people influence almost all people, lowering the need to think by smart people
5. Crazy smart people influence all people, lowering the need to think by very smart people
6. Intelligent machines enter the picture, automating this process and making it scale to every facet of our lives
7. Normal people train machines to help normal people, obsolescing normal people
8. Smart people train machines to help normal+smart people, obsolescing smart people
9. Very smart people train machines to influence normal+smart+very smart people, obsolescing very smart people
10. Crazy smart people train machines to influence normal+smart+very smart+crazy smart people, obsolescing crazy smart people
11. Machines are omni-super-smart, obsolescing everyone