Schmidhuber: Full RSI Requires Self-Improving Hardware — No ASI Without Mastering the Real World
SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-09-24
In a follow-up to his long report, Schmidhuber argues the RSI debate has focused too narrowly on self-improving software: true AI must combine software research with machines and robots in the physical world, since there is no ASI without mastery of reality.
Section 9 of his report makes the case that full recursive self-improvement requires self-improving hardware, building on his Gödel Machine design (Sec. 5). He closes with a historical survey of physical self-replicating machines — from Descartes, Eliot and Butler, and Capek to von Neumann, Zuse and Penrose since the 1940s — noting that self-replicating software is almost trivial (computer viruses), but how to build general-purpose physical self-replicators remains an open problem.
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