[jmull]

"If"?!?

Don't worry, uninterrupted exponentially improving AI certainly will not happen.

Exponential growth requires a uniform medium to support it, which -- of course -- it quickly exhaust.

The idea that smart AI will produce smarter AI which will produce even smarter AI seems wildly simplistic and I'm surprised it has any traction. Why assume it would be a linear progression... a given advance might require a leap that even the smarter AI can't make directly. Or, the problem may become exponentially more difficult at a rate outstripping the advances. And those are just really simple objections. In the real world, progress on big things is messy and complex.