[ExI] Recursive self improvement and GPT-7

Fri Sep 18 14:36:50 UTC 2026

Hi Russell and everyone,

Here is a recording of my presentation and some follow up Q&A for these
slides:

https://youtu.be/KUPTtraCK-g

Jason

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 9:20 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Russell,
>
> I appreciate the feedback. I have a lot of important context in the slide
> notes, and I deal with the population expectation divergence there. I just
> made a recording of myself giving this presentation yesterday, so when I
> have that I can share it.
>
> In the meantime I will share my slide notes (which can be seen more easily
> if you access the slides from a desktop or laptop computer) for the slide
> on human population not reaching infinity this year, as well as the notes
> for the slide immediately before it:
>
> Slide with models pointing to 2027:
>
> Researchers who have studied these trends have found that extremely simple
> hyperbolic models account for over 99% of demographic, societal, and
> economic macrodynamics across millennia of human history.
>
> Here we’ll look at two examples of simple models which accurately account
> for human population trends as well as the pace of historic change.
>
> (animate)
> The first model was proposed by Heinz von Foerster in 1960, using only
> data about human population growth. Which gave this simple formula here.
> Note it is a hyperbolic function, and its accuracy in terms of the
> coefficient of determination is 99.6%
>
> This degree of fit is astonishing, implying that things we consider as
> pivotal in shaping history, like the fall of Rome, the black death, the
> discovery of New World, the invention of agriculture and the printing press
> – are unnoticed blips against the backdrop of these much greater,
> ever-present macro trends.
>
> (animate)
> The second model is based on a list of major historic events compiled by
> Alexander Panov, it yielded an even simpler model, shown here, which is
> even more accurate, with a coefficient of determination of 99.91%!
>
> What is fascinating about this, is that someone in ancient times or the
> middle ages, didn’t need to know about Moore’s law to have performed this
> same population or historic event extrapolation. Merely using the
> population or historical data available in their time, they could have made
> this same prediction: that something interesting would happen early in the
> 21st century.
>
> What is notable is that both of these models were based on entirely
> different data sets composed by, and reported by different people in
> different times.
>
> Another thing, which you may have already noticed, which is somewhat
> alarming, is how both of these have a nearly identical singularity point
> (animate) t=2026.87 for Foerster and t=2027 for Panov. (animate) This is
> where a “divide by zero” happens in the equation.. What could this mean for
> us?
>
>
> Slide on human population growth rate:
>
> But we also note that the rate of world population growth peaked in 1963,
> just a few years after Foerster’s 1960 paper was published. Does that
> invalidate his prediction?
>
> Despite the slowdown in population, the pace of technological development
> and the pace of history has not slowed. How could this be?
>
> What I think can explain it, is that at this time, humans began to offload
> more and more of their decisions and processing to computers, in effect,
> making human thinking faster. The world's first computer, the ENIAC, in its
> 10 years of operation, performed more calculations in those ten years than
> had all humans that came before it. And with the rise of personal
> computers, office workers (which include engineers, technologists, and
> inventors) became far more productive.
>
> So it's not just the population of human inventors that matters, but also
> their productivity. Today, one human using AI can have the productivity of
> 10 or 100 inventors.
>
> We may soon see the rise of AI agent inventors shoot unbounded upward,
> unconstrained by normal limits on human population growth.
>
> Perhaps it will be Seth's technology that triggers this by cloning human
> innovators.
> Then we will see an unlimited number of personal AI agents replicating
> human engineers, technologists, and inventors. We will then have reached
> the zenith of ingenuity, part human – part machine.
>
> ---------------
>
> (New email commentary from me to the extropy list)
>
> I think we're starting to see this now with agent swarms of ever
> increasing size. We still won't hit infinity since there are physical
> limits, but I think agent swarms mark a plausible point of identifying the
> recursive self improvement necessary to qualify as an ultraintelligent
> machine, and where human ingenuity departs from the control loop -- a new
> paradigm between the past few million years of the homo genus will have
> begun.
>
> Jason
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 5:07 AM Russell Standish <lists at hpcoders.com.au>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 09, 2026 at 10:25:01AM -0400, Jason Resch via extropy-chat
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > We appear to remain on track to reach the singularity between most
>> November of
>> > 2026 to the end of December 2026:
>> >
>> > https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/
>> > 1bITq1_XCNY4sEmZhbkcRUr77PtWawP3rpLxNYZxDTBY/edit?usp=drivesdk
>>
>> Some things are wrong with this presentation - I can't believe we will
>> hit infinite population next year (or in any year, for that
>> matter). The hyperbolic curve fit seems definitely ad absurdum. It
>> also contradicts a later slide showing that we have passed the
>> inflection point in population growth, so definitely not hyperbolic then.
>>
>>
>> >
>> > As was predicted 60 years ago, and again about 20 years ago, using two
>> entirely
>> > distinct data sets. See the slide notes for each slide as they give
>> important
>> > context for what each slide shows.
>> >
>> > Jason
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >     AI Has Solved One of Math’s $1 Million Millennium Prize Problems
>> >
>> >      John K Clark    See what's on my list at  Extropolis
>> >
>> >     4y9
>> >     _______________________________________________
>> >     extropy-chat mailing list
>> >     extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> >     http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>> >
>>
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
>> Principal, High Performance Coders     hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
>>                       http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>
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