[Tenobrus]

it is very clear to me that humans do in fact have a recursive self-improvement ability, and i'm confused why you think otherwise

[astrange]

I think people can read books (self improvement) and have children (recursive), but neither of those are both.

[lucubratory]

Why do you think that the human population is more intelligent, knowledgeable, and achieves greater technological feats as time goes on? It's because of recursive self-improvement, we are raised and educated into being better in a quite general sense, which includes being better at raising and educating; nearly every generation this cycle repeats and has for all of human history, at least since we acquired language. We also build machines that help us to make better machines, and then we use those better machines to make even better machines, another example of recursive self-improvement.

[rralian]

New generations build onto the scientific knowledge of previous generations. It may not be fast but that sounds like recursive improvement to me. It seems reasonable for AI to accelerate this process.

[spacecadet]

A very small percentage maybe. I think I agree with the notion that most people bias toward thinking they are improving while actually self-sabotaging.