Published in Mainebiz, August 11, 2026
What happens the first time a machine is smart enough to build a smarter machine, which then builds an even smarter one, faster than we can follow?
We are at the dawn of a new age, and AI-based machine intelligence is poised to surpass human cognition and thinking is some key areas.
AI is changing everything at a dizzying pace — sometimes promising, sometimes ominous, sometimes worrisome. We are at the dawn of a new age more profound than any technological change in our history: fire, the wheel, the combustion engine, the internet. Yet we remain woefully unprepared for this new era.
One of the newer concerns — and opportunities — is recursive self-improvement: an AI system that can improve its own capabilities — its algorithms, architecture, training process or code — without human involvement, where each improvement makes the system better able to make the next.