You are very likely to see declining returns, not accelerating returns, which is exactly what we see in all other fields of technology—the higher you get, the harder it is to go further.
In many fields of technology, we see sigmoid curves, where initial advancements lead to accelerating returns until it becomes difficult to move further ahead without running up against hard problems or fundamental limits, and returns diminish.
Making an artificial intelligence as capable as a human intelligence may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean that if we reach that point, we’ll be facing major barriers to further progression. I would say we don’t have much evidence to suggest humans are even near the ceiling of what’s strictly possible with a purely biological intelligence; we’ve had very little opportunity for further biological development since the point when cultural developments started accounting for most of our environmental viability, plus we face engineering challenges such as only being able to shove so large a cranium through a bipedal pelvis.
We have no way to even measure intelligence, let alone determine how close to capacity we’re at. We could be 90% there, or 1%, and we have no way, presently, of distinguishing between the two.
We are the smartest creatures ever to have lived on the planet Earth as far as we can tell, and given that we have seen no signs of extraterrestrial civilization, we could very well be the most intelligent creatures in the galaxy for all we know.
As for shoving out humans, isn’t the simplest solution to that simply growing them in artificial wombs?
We already have a simpler solution than that, namely the Cesarian section. It hasn’t been a safe option long enough to have had a significant impact as an evolutionary force though. Plus, there hasn’t been a lot of evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence since the advent of agriculture.
We might be the most intelligent creatures in the galaxy, but that’s a very different matter from being near the most intelligent things that could be constructed out of a comparable amount of matter. Natural selection isn’t that great a process for optimizing intelligence, it’s backpedaled on hominids before given the right niche to fill, so while we don’t have a process for measuring how close we are to the ceiling, I think the reasonable prior on our being close to it is pretty low.
In many fields of technology, we see sigmoid curves, where initial advancements lead to accelerating returns until it becomes difficult to move further ahead without running up against hard problems or fundamental limits, and returns diminish.
Making an artificial intelligence as capable as a human intelligence may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean that if we reach that point, we’ll be facing major barriers to further progression. I would say we don’t have much evidence to suggest humans are even near the ceiling of what’s strictly possible with a purely biological intelligence; we’ve had very little opportunity for further biological development since the point when cultural developments started accounting for most of our environmental viability, plus we face engineering challenges such as only being able to shove so large a cranium through a bipedal pelvis.
We have no way to even measure intelligence, let alone determine how close to capacity we’re at. We could be 90% there, or 1%, and we have no way, presently, of distinguishing between the two.
We are the smartest creatures ever to have lived on the planet Earth as far as we can tell, and given that we have seen no signs of extraterrestrial civilization, we could very well be the most intelligent creatures in the galaxy for all we know.
As for shoving out humans, isn’t the simplest solution to that simply growing them in artificial wombs?
We already have a simpler solution than that, namely the Cesarian section. It hasn’t been a safe option long enough to have had a significant impact as an evolutionary force though. Plus, there hasn’t been a lot of evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence since the advent of agriculture.
We might be the most intelligent creatures in the galaxy, but that’s a very different matter from being near the most intelligent things that could be constructed out of a comparable amount of matter. Natural selection isn’t that great a process for optimizing intelligence, it’s backpedaled on hominids before given the right niche to fill, so while we don’t have a process for measuring how close we are to the ceiling, I think the reasonable prior on our being close to it is pretty low.