I agree with most of this, but the 13 OOMs from the the software feedback loop sounds implausible.
From How Far Can AI Progress Before Hitting Effective Physical Limits?:
the brain is severely undertrained, humans spend only a small fraction of their time on focussed academic learning
I expect that humans spend at least 10% of their first decade building a world model, and that evolution has heavily optimized at least the first couple of years of that. A large improvement in school-based learning wouldn’t have much effect on my estimate of the total learning needed.
The first year or two of human learning seem optimized enough that they’re mostly in evolutionary equilibrium—see Henrich’s discussion of the similarities to chimpanzees in The Secret of Our Success.
Human learning around age 10 is presumably far from equilibrium.
I’ll guess that I see more of the valuable learning taking place in the first 2 years or so than do other people here.