The crazy thing is ... he is not entirely wrong. Only mostly.
I recommend having a stroll through his website, for anyone interested in AI (or even art, creativity, etc.):
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/
Special Notes:
Godel Machine : While clearly absolutely impractical, this is a nice theoretical construction on what we could mean by "self-improvement" in a real, definite way.
Speed Priors
Super Omegas (and various thoughts on algorithmic information)
Always keep in mind a grain of salt when reading his results, but they are genuinely great.
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I think establishing causation and giving credit does have a role in research, namely giving additional opportunity to those researchers to do even better research, elucidating the history of science, and to an extent giving a monetary incentive and morale recognition for researchers w.r.t. prizes, grants, etc.
For example isn't the story of Einstein, or von Neuman, or Feynman, etc. part of a narrative that makes science compelling? They had very interesting and lively lives and opinions that sometimes drove their research tastes. There is value in preserving individual history (as well as disregarding it when not particularly relevant).
That said, a scientists (or a good citizen in general) should not be driven primarily by ego, and in science this becomes clearly bad, impeding open collaboration, exchange of ideas that are essential for good functioning and good progress of science; I'd say Schmidhuber does let that through sometimes, to the detriment of his work.
Reminds of Dave Ungar haunting OOPSLA talks for some time. There were only two possibilities:
1. The idea you presented was something SELF already did and therefore uninteresting.
2. The idea your presented was not like what SELF already did, and therefore wrong.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I hear he has mellowed.