The human brain possesses certain abilities that other animals' brains lack. Our species owes these special abilities to its dominant position. Other animals may have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have more clever brains. If machine brains one day surpass human brains in general intelligence, this new superintelligence could become very powerful. Just as the fate of gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, the fate of our species would also depend on the actions of machine superintelligence. But we have an advantage: we get to take the first step. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or to shape the initial conditions in such a way that an intelligence explosion is viable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we need to navigate through a fa.