There is no particular reason to assume that recursive self-improvement would be rapid.
All the technological revolutions so far have accounted for little more than a 1.5% sustained annual productivity growth. There are always some low-hanging fruit with new technology, but once they have been picked, the effort required for each incremental improvement tends to grow exponentially.
That's my default scenario with AGI as well. After AGI arrives, it will leave humans behind very slowly.
Suppose you don't have a hammer, but just hammer at things with bare hands. Then you find some primitive rock - artificial general hammering! With that you can over time build some primitive hammer - now we're talking superhuman general hammering. With that you can then build a better hammer more quickly, and boom, you have recursive self-improvement, and soon you'll take over the world.
All the technological revolutions so far have accounted for little more than a 1.5% sustained annual productivity growth. There are always some low-hanging fruit with new technology, but once they have been picked, the effort required for each incremental improvement tends to grow exponentially.
That's my default scenario with AGI as well. After AGI arrives, it will leave humans behind very slowly.