I forget if I’ve said this elsewhere, but we should expect human intelligence to be just a bit above the bare minimum required to result in technological advancement. Otherwise, our ancestors would have been where we are now.
(Just a bit above, because there was the nice little overhang of cultural transmission: once the hardware got good enough, the software could be transmitted way more effectively between people and across generations. So we’re quite a bit more intelligent than our basically anatomically equivalent ancestors of 500,000 years ago. But not as big a gap as the gap from that ancestor to our last common ancestor with chimps, 6-7 million years ago.)
This point is made in Superintelligence, right? It sounds really familiar. It’s also a good addendum to this post, perhaps I’ll add it into the print version, thanks!
I forget if I’ve said this elsewhere, but we should expect human intelligence to be just a bit above the bare minimum required to result in technological advancement. Otherwise, our ancestors would have been where we are now.
(Just a bit above, because there was the nice little overhang of cultural transmission: once the hardware got good enough, the software could be transmitted way more effectively between people and across generations. So we’re quite a bit more intelligent than our basically anatomically equivalent ancestors of 500,000 years ago. But not as big a gap as the gap from that ancestor to our last common ancestor with chimps, 6-7 million years ago.)
This point is made in Superintelligence, right? It sounds really familiar. It’s also a good addendum to this post, perhaps I’ll add it into the print version, thanks!