[toth]

> Are you just being overawed by IQ tests, which are notorious for measuring only ability to pass IQ tests?

People like to say things like this, but nothing could be further than the truth. There is a vast literature showing that IQ predicts things like job performance, school performance, income and wealth [1]. IQ is highly persistent across time for fixed individuals. Yes, "intelligence" is not a precisely defined concept, but that doesn't mean that it isn't real. A lot of useful concepts have some vagueness about, even "height" to take the example parodied in the OP.

And "super intelligence" is admittedly even vaguer, it just means sufficiently smarter than humans. If you do have a problem with that presentation just think of specific capabilities a "super intelligence" would be expected to have. For instance, the ability to attain super-human performance in a game (e.g., chess or go) that it had never seen before. The ability to produce fully functional highly complex software from a natural language spec in instants. The ability to outperform any human at any white-collar job without being specifically trained for it.

Are you confident that a machine with all those capabilities are impossible?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...

[card_zero]

I think those capabilities are made out of ideas. I think yes, a machine could have ideas, and then it would be a person, and an anticlimax.

[ben_w]

> and then it would be a person, and an anticlimax.

It might be a person (but: can you prove those things are sufficient for personhood?), but even then it sure isn't a human person.

And what do you mean by an anticlimax?

To circumvent any question of what it takes to make an AI work, let's posit a brain upload. Just one person, so it's a memetic monoculture — no matter how many instances you make, they'll all have the same skills and same flaws.

Transistors are faster than synapses by about the same ratio to which a marathon runner is faster than continental drift, so even if the only difference is speed, not quality of thought, that's such a huge chasm of difference that I can't see how it would be an anti climax even if the original person is extraordinarily lazy.