This chapter is about different kinds of superintelligent entities that could exist. I like to think about the closely related question, ‘what kinds of better can intelligence be?’ You can be a better baker if you can bake a cake faster, or bake more cakes, or bake better cakes. Similarly, a system can become more intelligent if it can do the same intelligent things faster, or if it does things that are qualitatively more intelligent. (Collective intelligence seems somewhat different, in that it appears to be a means to be faster or able to do better things, though it may have benefits in dimensions I’m not thinking of.)
The way I might understand it is that you can be good at baking a cake yourself, or you can be good at leveraging other people’s talents to bake cakes. Similarly, a collective superintelligence is smart by virtue of figuring out how to solve a hard problem using moderately smart things.
The way I might understand it is that you can be good at baking a cake yourself, or you can be good at leveraging other people’s talents to bake cakes. Similarly, a collective superintelligence is smart by virtue of figuring out how to solve a hard problem using moderately smart things.