the issue is whether something happens efficiently enough to be local or fast enough to accumulate advantage between the leading Friendly AI and the leading unFriendly AI

Uh, that's a totally different issue from the one I was discussing.

To recap: I was pointing out that machines have been writing code and improving themselves for decades - that refactoring and lint-like programs applying their own improvements to their own codebases has a long history in the community - dating back to the early days of Smalltalk. That progress in computer ability at self-improvement (via modification of your own codebase) is, in point of fact, a long, slow and gradual process that has been going on for decades so far - and thus is not really well conceived of as being something that will happen suddenly in the future - when computers attain "insight".

Also, I notice that you have "quietly" edited the original post - in an attempt to eliminate the very point I was originally criticising. This rather makes it look as though I was misquoting you. Then you accuse me of attacking a straw man - after this clumsy attempt to conceal the original evidence. Oh well, at least you are correcting your own mistakes when they are pointed out to you - it seems like a kind of progress to me.