We can roughly separate intelligence into two categories: _raw innovative capability_ (the ability to figure things out from scratch, without the benefit of those who came before you), and _culture processing_ (the ability to learn from accumulated human knowledge). It’s not clear that humans have the highest raw innovative capability; we may just have much better culture. For example, feral children raised outside of human society look very “unintelligent”, The Secret of Our Success documents cases where culture trumped innovative capability, and humans actually _don’t_ have the most neurons, or the most neurons in the forebrain.
(Why is this relevant to AI alignment? Matthew claims that it has implications on AI takeoff speeds, though he doesn’t argue for that claim in the post.)
Planned opinion:
It seems very hard to actually make a principled distinction between these two facets of intelligence, because culture has such an influence over our “raw innovative capability” in the sense of our ability to make original discoveries / learn new things. While feral children might be less intelligent than animals (I wouldn’t know), the appropriate comparison would be against “feral animals” that also didn’t get opportunities to explore their environment and learn from their parents, and even so I’m not sure how much I’d trust results from such a “weird” (evolutionarily off-distribution) setup.
Planned summary for the Alignment Newsletter:
Planned opinion: