| > there is a hard limit, but most likely well above human level I suppose you're thinking of the speed of light, but I meant a somewhat more prosaic limit of having nowhere to go. If at some point an intelligence of level n can't do much better than chance at finding an improvement to n, intelligence growth might be very slow. I was wrong to refer to this limit as "hard", but it seems like a pretty plausible scenario to me. Our current software industry suffers from this problem. In this future, the most intelligent agents might be only a few standard deviations above the brightest current humans. > a human-made substrate could most certainly think way faster than evolution-made neurons, and the software could probably at least get rid of biases. I don't expect either of those to produce much effective increase in intelligence. Speed increases aren't really the same as intelligence. Speeding up a dog's brain by a million times will not produce a more intelligent dog, only a faster one. (I'm not knocking faster thinking, by the way; it's just not the same as being able to think more complex thoughts). The most intelligent things people do tend not to be the product of conscious, rational thought, but of loading up your mind with a lot of details about the problem you want to solve and waiting for systems below conscious thought deliver answers. Therefore, learning how to be more rational will help only incrementally if you're already fairly rational. |
> In this future, the most intelligent agents might be only a few standard deviations above the brightest current humans.
Current methods of doing software are reaching their limits. That doesn't mean we have reached the limit yet. See Squeak, and more recently the Viewpoint Research Institute's work: <http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm>. When I see Frank (basically a personal computing suite in 20K lines, compilers included), I see a proof that we just do software wrong. The actual limit of what humans can program is probably still far.
Fast intelligence isn't a panacea, but still: imagine an Em thinking 10 times faster than meatware, on a personal computer, capable of copying itself over the network. That alone would be pretty dangerous. Now give it perfect dedication, and enough common sense to avoid most obvious mistakes… Now we could stop it… With another such Em. And then Hanson is back.