Comment by Retric
3 years ago
It’s not assuming we are near the limit of intelligence.
Let’s assume we can build something 3x as intelligent as a single person. What exactly can it do that a single person can’t? The thing is the world is filled with super human intelligence, groups of people can create things that are beyond any single person but they are still constrained by physical reality.
I don't exactly see how to define "3x as intelligent as a single person" so I'll conveniently define it as something that thinks 3x faster than a single person. A single such thing can talk to 3 persons simultaneously, and 100000 such things working together can talk to 300000 persons simultaneously.
Except you could also just use 300,000 human level intelligences to have those 300,000 conversations. So if having 300,000 conversations is the goal then super human intelligence doesn’t suddenly allow that to happen and may in fact make it harder if they take more than 3x the resources per intelligence.
A billion humans can't build a tree, but that's not because trees can't exist in physical reality. Something more intelligent than a human might a) be able to understand some part of this world which humans don't, and b) put it to some use that we aren't thinking about.
Might is doing some heavy lifting there, but of course humans have already gone past simply growing trees from seeds.
You are asking anyone to tell you what a 3x more intelligent human can do, and if nobody can tell you, you conclude that a 3x more intelligent human cannot do anything. That isn't convincing. We know there are individual humans who can do things no large group of humans can do - no company is Euler. Since no individual has 3x human intelligence, none of us can tell you. But that's not convincing that such an individual therefore cannot do anything novel or useful. I offer cellular biology as a thing which humans have some understanding of, but nothing like total understanding of - not in the details, not in the overall organization. And suggest that a more intelligent human might be able to move the needle there in a way which could lead to anything from nanofactories to cures for diseases to new life forms to new chemical synthesis methods. Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Einstein for seeing relativity - why couldn't or wouldn't there be more techniques or concepts like that waiting for the right intelligence to see them? Either there are no more, or any remaining ones need hyper-intelligence to find, but why would either of those things be likely?
Also humans don't make trees, humans stand watching while trees make themselves. Humans cannot make a plant or animal cell in a lab starting from atoms; nature can so it isn't a physical limitation. It's a matter of limited understanding of both how they are made, and the techniques to make them. Limited understanding is the thing more intelligence would attack.
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