There does seem to be a kind of turnpike theory-like effect to technological development. I'm reminded of Schmidhuber's PowerPlay (https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5

There does seem to be a kind of turnpike theory-like effect to technological development. I'm reminded of Schmidhuber's PowerPlay (https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5309 https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5309), too. It just trains on increasingly difficult problems with no direct objective function beyond solving the current problem and devising a harder one.