Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine
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Cites
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
Shannon, C. E. (1948) · Bell System Technical Journal · doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x · Cited by 88,486 · see citing works
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The ethics of artificial intelligence
Bostrom, N., & Yudkowsky, E. (2014) · The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139046855.020 · Cited by 918 · see citing works
Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence
Russell, S., Dewey, D., & Tegmark, M. (2015) · AI Magazine · doi:10.1609/aimag.v36i4.2577 · Cited by 637 · see citing works
Viewpoint: when will AI exceed human performance? evidence from AI experts
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The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis
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Responses to catastrophic AGI risk: a survey
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A Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy
Baum, S. D. (2017) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3070741 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Liu, H.-Y., Lauta, K. C., & Maas, M. M. (2018) · Futures · doi:10.1016/j.futures.2018.04.009 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
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Gödel Agent: A Self-Referential Agent Framework for Recursively Self-Improvement
Yin, X., Wang, X., Pan, L., Lin, L., Wan, X., & Wang, W. Y. (2025) · Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1354 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation
Zelikman, E., Lorch, E., Mackey, L., & Kalai, A. T. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.02304 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
“The broader concept of RSI dates back at least half a century, formalized by Good (1966) and later by Schmidhuber (2003), but our work represents a more modest and specific application of these ideas.”
BackgroundGödel Agent: A Self-Referential Agent Framework for Recursive Self-Improvement
Yin, X., Wang, X., Pan, L., Lin, L., Wan, X., & Wang, W. Y. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.04444 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
“The concept of recursive self-improvement has a long history (Good, 1966; Schmidhuber, 1987).”
Examining popular arguments against AI existential risk: a philosophical analysis
Swoboda, T., Uuk, R., Lauwaert, L., Rebera, A. P., Oimann, A.-K., Chomanski, B., & Prunkl, C. (2026) · Ethics and Information Technology · doi:10.1007/s10676-025-09881-y · Cited by 1 · see citing works
“Similarly, Frederike Kaltheuner of Human Rights Watch advocates concentrating on known issues with AI, such as amplified misinformation, biased training data and outputs, and erosion of user privacy, rather than on speculative future risks.”
The Red Queen Gödel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators
Iacob, A., Jovanović, A., Shen, W. F., Burkhardt, D., Kurmanji, M., Tastan, N., Sani, L., Venanzi, N. A. E., Nie, J., Odonnat, A., et al. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2606.26294 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
“Wang et al. [3] show that a node’s immediate benchmark performance may not predict long-run self-improvement value: a weak node may produce strong descendants.”
Wang, W., Piękos, P., Nanbo, L., Laakom, F., Chen, Y., Ostaszewski, M., Zhuge, M., & Schmidhuber, J. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.21614
“The general concepts of machine self-improvement were first systematically articulated by Good (1966), who described the possibility of “Intelligence Explosion" once machines acquire the capacity to design more capable successors.”
MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution
Wang, Z., Yan, M., Bi, J., Yan, S., Tresp, V., & Ma, Y. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2607.05297
“In the vocabulary of self-improving machines (Good, 1965; Schmidhuber, 2006), they are self-improving but stop short of being recursively self-improving.”
Recursive Self-Improvement in AI: From Bounded Self-Refinement to Autonomous Research Loops
Chen, M., Wang, L., & Qu, B. (2026) · arXiv
“Good’s “intelligence explosion” argu-ment [1] and Schmidhuber’s provably-optimal Gödel machines [2] framed recursive self-improvement (RSI) as a theoretical endpoint decades before any system could plausibly attempt it.”
Zhang, J., Yuan, B., & Zhang, Q. (2026) · Entropy · doi:10.3390/e28090951
- Authors
- Good, I. J.
- Corresponding author
- Good, Irving John
- Venue
- Advances in Computers
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Published
- 1966
- Pages
- 31-88
- ISSN
- 0065-2458 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1586718744
- Cited by
- 703
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 55 · 2025: 66 · 2024: 56 · 2023: 51 · 2022: 65 · 2021: 57 · 2020: 66 · 2019: 48 · 2018: 30 · 2017: 35 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 18 · 2014: 20 · 2013: 11 · 2012: 23
- FWCI
- 8.44
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- Advances in computers (publishedVersion)
- VTechWorks (Virginia Tech) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Cognitive Computing and Networks
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Psychiatry, Mental Health, Neuroscience
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
- Keywords
- machine intelligence, human brain, thinking, memory, meaning, embodiment, machine design
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