Humans still get advantages from more or less smarts within the human range—we can use this to estimate the slope of returns on intelligence near human intelligence.
This doesn’t rule out that maybe at the equivalent of IQ 250, all the opportunities for being smart get used up and there’s no more benefits to be had—for that, maybe try to think about some equivalent of intelligence for corporations, nations, or civilizations—are there projects that a “smarter” corporation (maybe one that’s hired 2x as many researchers) could do that a “dumber” corporation couldn’t, thus justifying returns to increasing corporate intelligence-equivalent?
An alternate way of thinking about it would be to try to predict where the ceiling of a game is from its complexity (or some combination of algorithmic complexity and complexity of realizable states). Tic tac toe is a simple game, and this seems to go hand in hand with the fact that intelligence is only useful for playing tic tac toe up to a very low ceiling. Chess is a more complicated game, and humans haven’t reached the ceiling, but we’re not too far from it—the strongest computers all start drawing each other all the time around 3600 elo, so maybe the ceiling is around that level and more intelligence won’t improve results, or will have abysmal returns. From this perspective, where would you expect the ceiling is for the “game” that is the entire universe?
Humans still get advantages from more or less smarts within the human range—we can use this to estimate the slope of returns on intelligence near human intelligence.
This doesn’t rule out that maybe at the equivalent of IQ 250, all the opportunities for being smart get used up and there’s no more benefits to be had—for that, maybe try to think about some equivalent of intelligence for corporations, nations, or civilizations—are there projects that a “smarter” corporation (maybe one that’s hired 2x as many researchers) could do that a “dumber” corporation couldn’t, thus justifying returns to increasing corporate intelligence-equivalent?
An alternate way of thinking about it would be to try to predict where the ceiling of a game is from its complexity (or some combination of algorithmic complexity and complexity of realizable states). Tic tac toe is a simple game, and this seems to go hand in hand with the fact that intelligence is only useful for playing tic tac toe up to a very low ceiling. Chess is a more complicated game, and humans haven’t reached the ceiling, but we’re not too far from it—the strongest computers all start drawing each other all the time around 3600 elo, so maybe the ceiling is around that level and more intelligence won’t improve results, or will have abysmal returns. From this perspective, where would you expect the ceiling is for the “game” that is the entire universe?