Schmidhuber has written about recursive self-improvement since his diploma thesis in the 80s: "Evolutionary principles in self-referential learning, or on learn

Schmidhuber has written about recursive self-improvement since his diploma thesis in the 80s: "Evolutionary principles in self-referential learning, or on learning how to learn: The meta-meta-... hook". Your quote sounds like it could just as well have been from that thesis.