[mannykannot]

You are right about Chollet not ruling out growth altogether, but he does say - as a section heading, no less - that "our environment puts a hard limit on our individual intelligence." After a diversion into a non-sequitur about individual humans being incapable of bootstrapping their own intelligence, he launches into an extended argument that intelligence can only grow with the culture it is embedded in, and so intelligence can only grow linearly at best (linearly in what? culture?) The whole argument is a waste of time, because AI apocalypse fears are not predicated on exponential growth (and certainly not growth without limit), but only that it outstrips that of humans (and maybe not even that.) Chollet never seems to address the possibility that AGI might drive its own culture to grow, just as our ancestors' developing intelligence drove the (proto-)human culture to grow. (If Collet were to deny that this happened, then he would not be able to explain why human intelligence outstrips that of other apes, given his position that culture constrains intelligence.)