The news is full of sober warnings about AI. The latest: recursive self-improvement, or RSI. 

RSI is the process by which AI systems improve themselves on their own—and then, improve their own ability to improve. “We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable,” wrote Marina Favaro, who leads the Anthropic Institute, and Jack Clark, an Anthropic cofounder. “But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.”

According to Anthropic, the length of tasks that models can accomplish on their own is now doubling every four months, up from seven months just over a year ago. The company reports that as of May, Claude is writing over 80% of the code that has been merged into Anthropic’s systems. 

If and when RSI arrives, it could have enormous consequences, both good and bad. And so, Anthropic’s authors conclude, we need to slow or pause frontier AI development, “to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications.”

The post sparked much debate about whether a pause was possible given the financial incentives, whether RSI would finally produce some version of the AGI singularity or utopia, and whether RSI was even possible at all. 

But as we marvel at the possibility of recursive self-improvement in machines, we seem to have lost sight of the recursive self-improvement that’s built into our humanity—our fundamental drive to grow, improve, and evolve. This, I would argue, is a fundamentally human skill that can’t be replaced by........

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