The compelling argument to me is the evolutionary one.
Humans today have mental capabilities essentially identical to our ancestors of 20,000 years ago. If you want to be picky, say 3,000 years ago.
Which means we built civilizations, including our current one, pretty much immediately (on an evolutionary timescale) when the smartest of us became capable of doing so (I suspect the median human today isn’t smart enough to do it even now).
We’re analogous to the first amphibian that developed primitive lungs and was first to crawl up onto the beach to catch insects or eat eggs. Or the first dinosaur that developed primitive wings and used them to jump a little further than its competitors. Over evolutionary time later air-breathing creatures became immensely better at living on land, and birds developed that could soar for hours at a time.
From this viewpoint there’s no reason to think our current intelligence is anywhere near any limits, or is greater than the absolute minimum necessary to develop a civilization at all. We are as-stupid-as-it-is-possible-to-be and still develop a civilization. Because the hominids that were one epsilon dumber than us, for millions of years, never did.
If being smarter helps our inclusive fitness (debatable now that civilization exists), our descendants can be expected to steadily become brighter. We know John von Neumann-level intelligence is possible without crippling social defects; we’ve no idea where any limits are (short of pure thermodynamics).
Given that civilization has already changed evolutionary pressures on humans, and things like genetic engineering can be expected to disrupt things further, probably that otherwise-natural course of evolution won’t happen. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re no smarter than the people who built the pyramids, who were themselves barely smart enough to build any civilization at all.
It’s not obvious to me that “universal learner” is a thing, as “universal Turing machine” is. I’ve never heard of a rigorous mathematical proof that it is (as we have for UTMs). Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention.
Even if it is a thing, knowing a fair number of humans, only a small fraction of them can possibly be “universal learners”. I know people that will never understand decimal points as long as they live or how they might study, let alone calculus. Yet are not considered to be mentally abnormal.
The compelling argument to me is the evolutionary one.
Humans today have mental capabilities essentially identical to our ancestors of 20,000 years ago. If you want to be picky, say 3,000 years ago.
Which means we built civilizations, including our current one, pretty much immediately (on an evolutionary timescale) when the smartest of us became capable of doing so (I suspect the median human today isn’t smart enough to do it even now).
We’re analogous to the first amphibian that developed primitive lungs and was first to crawl up onto the beach to catch insects or eat eggs. Or the first dinosaur that developed primitive wings and used them to jump a little further than its competitors. Over evolutionary time later air-breathing creatures became immensely better at living on land, and birds developed that could soar for hours at a time.
From this viewpoint there’s no reason to think our current intelligence is anywhere near any limits, or is greater than the absolute minimum necessary to develop a civilization at all. We are as-stupid-as-it-is-possible-to-be and still develop a civilization. Because the hominids that were one epsilon dumber than us, for millions of years, never did.
If being smarter helps our inclusive fitness (debatable now that civilization exists), our descendants can be expected to steadily become brighter. We know John von Neumann-level intelligence is possible without crippling social defects; we’ve no idea where any limits are (short of pure thermodynamics).
Given that civilization has already changed evolutionary pressures on humans, and things like genetic engineering can be expected to disrupt things further, probably that otherwise-natural course of evolution won’t happen. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re no smarter than the people who built the pyramids, who were themselves barely smart enough to build any civilization at all.
I do agree that we may be the dumbest universal learners, but we’re still universal learners.
I don’t think there’s any such discontinuous phase shifts ahead of us.
It’s not obvious to me that “universal learner” is a thing, as “universal Turing machine” is. I’ve never heard of a rigorous mathematical proof that it is (as we have for UTMs). Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention.
Even if it is a thing, knowing a fair number of humans, only a small fraction of them can possibly be “universal learners”. I know people that will never understand decimal points as long as they live or how they might study, let alone calculus. Yet are not considered to be mentally abnormal.