Why Human Intelligence May Be Just a Glimmer of What's Possible
The possibility of vastly superhuman Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often seen as extraordinary, but perhaps it should be our default assumption. Comparing the constraints on human intelligence from its evolutionary origin with AI's potential suggests a significantly higher ceiling for artificial cognition.
Human intelligence arose via natural selection – a blind, incremental process optimizing only for immediate survival and reproduction, not maximal intelligence. Biological constraints like metabolic costs and childbirth risks limited brain development. Evolution is path-dependent; superior cognitive designs might be unreachable through gradual mutation from our biological base. The lack of species clustered just below human intelligence also argues against a nearby natural ceiling.
AI, especially future AGI, transcends these limits:
- Speed: Biological neurons (~10^2 Hz) are vastly slower than digital processors (10^9 Hz) or future optical computing. AI communication speeds (10^11 bps) dwarf human language (~10-50 bps), enabling faster thought and collaboration.
- Scalability & Duplicability: A capable AI can be copied almost instantly, unlike the decades needed to train human experts. This allows massive scaling of "talent" by turning capital into compute power, replicating individuals or entire expert teams on demand.
- Editability & Self-Improvement: AI can have 'root access' for modification. Systematic debugging, experimentation on copies, and version control enable rapid recursive self-improvement impossible for biological "wetware." AI can iterate and improve its own architecture deliberately.
- Memory: AI can possess vastly larger working memory than humans (e.g., holding libraries vs. a phone number) and near-perfect, instantly searchable long-term recall, free from human biases and decay.
- Collective Intelligence: AIs can merge knowledge directly and communicate with perfect fidelity, creating "collective brains" that learn and innovate far faster than human groups reliant on slow, lossy language. Insights can propagate instantly across countless copies.
- Architectural Freedom: AI isn't restricted to evolved brain structures; designers can explore fundamentally different and potentially superior cognitive architectures optimized for various goals.
- Focus & Endurance: Lacking biological needs (like sleep) and inherent cognitive biases, AI can operate 24/7 with unwavering focus and potentially greater rationality and consistency towards its objectives.
Human intelligence, though remarkable, is limited by its contingent evolutionary past. AI's fundamental advantages in speed, scalability, editability, memory, collective function, and architectural freedom strongly suggest its potential cognitive ceiling is vastly higher. Superhuman general AI thus appears a plausible, even likely, outcome of continued technological progress, rather than mere speculation.
