Recursive Self-Improvement is the Human Skill We Need in the AI Age

Across civilizations and centuries, the instruction is remarkably consistent.

For instance, in ancient Greece, there was the admonition inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to “Know thyself.” For the Stoics, fulfillment comes in realizing we have power over our own minds, not the outside world. “Look well into thyself,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “There is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.” There is the Atman of Hinduism, the inward voyage of Buddhism, the inner enlightenment of Sufism, the Kabbalah’s meditative deepening, the Christian “Kingdom of God is within.” All describe a recursive loop: examining ourselves to improve the self that does the examining. Because, as Socrates put it, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

But in the midst of our frenetic lives, it’s far too easy to live an unexamined life. In fact, much of our technology is designed to distract us from, or worse, replace this loop of self-examination and improvement. Take social media, which locks us in an eternal doomscrolling present. Our attention is mined for engagement through algorithms that encourage anger, outrage, and division. In this way, technology can negatively shift our recursive feedback loops from a focus on improvement to impairment. Unfortunately, we can see the results of this shift all around us, including in growing rates of anxiety, depression, and polarization.