Comment by jodrellblank
3 years ago
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.
The mathematical community is itself super human. Euler didn’t start from the ground up he leveraged peoples prior work.
Saying we can do something with cells isn’t convincing because we can already make arbitrary changes. I can email a fairly arbitrary DNA sequence and turn that into a viable organism. The existing cellular machinery is a tool to leverage just as other peoples work is a tool to leverage. There is plenty of work to be done, but there is no work in cellular biology that’s both physically possible and outside of the capability for groups of humans and their tools to do.
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