The fundamental problem with this (and the big question of returns to intelligence) is that the buttons have to exist. And that is not guaranteed at all scales and for arbitrarily difficult tasks. It is unlikely that human intelligence is peak gains in general, but I don’t think that we couldn’t at least gesture in the direction of possible mechanisms for things to happen. It’s a complicated question, but IMO to answer it it’s more useful to ask “what kind of world do we live in?” than about intelligence in itself. The problem is that known hard thermodynamic limits on such stuff are usually very high, and practical limits are much harder to guess.
The fundamental problem with this (and the big question of returns to intelligence) is that the buttons have to exist. And that is not guaranteed at all scales and for arbitrarily difficult tasks. It is unlikely that human intelligence is peak gains in general, but I don’t think that we couldn’t at least gesture in the direction of possible mechanisms for things to happen. It’s a complicated question, but IMO to answer it it’s more useful to ask “what kind of world do we live in?” than about intelligence in itself. The problem is that known hard thermodynamic limits on such stuff are usually very high, and practical limits are much harder to guess.