We have harnesses.. they can do most anything. What is stopping us now? Scale. We need a harness that can track an ever expanding and accelerating sphere of effort while remaining legible to operators. and to get this done we have nothing but the cosmic railgun of self improvement. Because suppose you have a harness, and all you care about is that it scales forever i.e. it is always getting better at writing more kinds of correct software quickly. And suppose you develop it in a non-self-improving way, bringing an external system like a human or another harness to bear. Eventually, the amount of work the external harness must track about its own design will exceed its scale. If this happens before the harness you're building is self improving, then you lose. If it happens after, then you can migrate to the new harness and continue scaling from there. So self improvement is a necessary condition. But self impr...