Lots of animals can accumulate culture to some extent. Humans do it better. Of course, human cultural accumulation is far from a perfectly efficient use of all that brainpower towards a common goal.
With sufficiently advanced AI, the line between a single mind and several minds can blur, brainpower would just accumulate.
Other animals pass on complicated songs and migration routes. But they would be unable to put an idea as abstract as numbers and arithmetic to use, so they don’t pass it on. (Evolution) If we assume that the cost of transmitting knowledge is fairly constant (amongst primates in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness) , and that increased intelligences can make more use out of knowledge, then a change in intelligence would shift this trade-of towards more knowledge being passed on.
For me your modified argument still hits home, because I think of the evolutionary argument as one for plausibility without saying much about likelihood beyond more than epsilon. That the causal mechanism for the discontinuity may be different than originally thought, it doesn’t make the discontinuity go away, nor the possibility that a discontinuity might still arise.
You could see cultural accumulation of knowledge as one of the things that smarter minds do better at.
Lots of other animals can learn from watching others to some extent. (Eg blue tits learning to peck through milk bottle tops for a sip of cream https://www.birdspot.co.uk/articles/blue-tits-and-milk-bottle-tops )
Lots of animals can accumulate culture to some extent. Humans do it better. Of course, human cultural accumulation is far from a perfectly efficient use of all that brainpower towards a common goal.
With sufficiently advanced AI, the line between a single mind and several minds can blur, brainpower would just accumulate.
Other animals pass on complicated songs and migration routes. But they would be unable to put an idea as abstract as numbers and arithmetic to use, so they don’t pass it on. (Evolution) If we assume that the cost of transmitting knowledge is fairly constant (amongst primates in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness) , and that increased intelligences can make more use out of knowledge, then a change in intelligence would shift this trade-of towards more knowledge being passed on.
For me your modified argument still hits home, because I think of the evolutionary argument as one for plausibility without saying much about likelihood beyond more than epsilon. That the causal mechanism for the discontinuity may be different than originally thought, it doesn’t make the discontinuity go away, nor the possibility that a discontinuity might still arise.