[SEQ RERUN] Recursive Self-Improvement
Today’s post, Recursive Self-Improvement was originally published on 01 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
When you take a process that is capable of making significant progress developing other processes, and turn it on itself, you should either see it flatline, or FOOM. The likelihood of it doing anything that looks like human-scale progress is unbelievably low.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was I Heart CYC, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I’m starting to notice a pattern here. Both Robin and Eliezer attempted at various times to explain the other’s verbal behavior in terms of non-argument pieces. They both did this in a sort of outside-view-ey, here’s-the-name-of-a-bias sort of way. And, importantly, it doesn’t seem to have improved the outcome even a little.