Couldn’t it be that the returns on intelligence tend to not be very high for a self-improving agent around the human area?
Seems unlikely to me, given my experience as an agent at roughly the human level of intelligence. If you gave me a human-readable version of my source code, the ability to use money to speed up my cognition, and the ability to spawn many copies of myself (both to parallelize effort and to perform experiments with) then I think I’d be “superintelligent” pretty quickly. (In order for the self-improvement landscape to be shallow around the human level, you’d need systems to be very hardware-limited, and hardware currently doesn’t look like the bottleneck.)
(I’m also not convinced it’s meaningful to talk about “the human level” except in a very broad sense of “having that super powerful domain generality that humans seem to possess”, so I’m fairly uncomfortable with terminology such as “20x the human level.”)
Seems unlikely to me, given my experience as an agent at roughly the human level of intelligence. If you gave me a human-readable version of my source code, the ability to use money to speed up my cognition, and the ability to spawn many copies of myself (both to parallelize effort and to perform experiments with) then I think I’d be “superintelligent” pretty quickly. (In order for the self-improvement landscape to be shallow around the human level, you’d need systems to be very hardware-limited, and hardware currently doesn’t look like the bottleneck.)
(I’m also not convinced it’s meaningful to talk about “the human level” except in a very broad sense of “having that super powerful domain generality that humans seem to possess”, so I’m fairly uncomfortable with terminology such as “20x the human level.”)