Why do you think that the human population is more intelligent, knowledgeable, and achieves greater technological feats as time goes on? It's because of recursive self-improvement, we are raised and educated into being better in a quite general sense, which includes being better at raising and educating; nearly every generation this cycle repeats and has for all of human history, at least since we acquired language. We also build machines that help us to make better machines, and then we use those better machines to make even better machines, another example of recursive self-improvement.
You're pointing out that groups/institutions/cultures/civilizations are examples of recursively self-improving entities, but the original point was about a recursively self-improving individual intelligent entity.
Well, to the extent that a human-level intelligence is an individual, anyway. We ourselves are probably a mixture-of-experts in some sense.
An individual human starts out a mewling baby and can end up a maxillofacial surgeon through at least partial examples of recursive self-improvement. Learn to walk, talk, read, write, structure, argue, essay, study, cite etc all the way through to the end, with what you previously learned allowing you to learn even more. There's a huge amount of outside help, but at least some of it is also self-improvement.
Also, for the purposes of talking about the phenomenon of recursive self-improvement, individual vs society isn't the end of analysis. Part of the reason AI recursive self-improvement is concerning is that people are worried about it happening on much faster than societal timescales, in ways that are not socially tractable like human societies are (e.g. if our society is "improving" in a way we don't like, we or other humans can intervene to prevent, alter, or mitigate it). It's also important to note that when we're talking about "recursive self-improvement" when it comes to AI, the "self" is not a single software artifact like Llama-70B. The "self" is AI in general, and the most common proposed mechanism is that an AI is better than us at designing and building AIs, and the resulting AI it makes us even better at designing and building AIs.
New generations build onto the scientific knowledge of previous generations. It may not be fast but that sounds like recursive improvement to me. It seems reasonable for AI to accelerate this process.
A very small percentage maybe. I think I agree with the notion that most people bias toward thinking they are improving while actually self-sabotaging.
