I'm stupid.

I can obviously do many basic everyday tasks, and I can do adequate software engineering, data science, linear algebra, transgender research, and various other things.

But I know basically nothing about chemistry, biology, neurology, advertising, geology, rocket science, law, business strategy, project management, political campaigning, anthropology, astronomy, etc. etc.. Further, because I'm mentally ill, I'm bad at social stuff and paying attention. I can also only work on one task at a time, rather than being able to work on millions of tasks at a time.

There are other humans whose stupidity lies in somewhat different areas than me. Most of the areas I can think of are covered by someone, though there are exceptions, e.g. I'm not aware of anyone who can do millions of tasks at a time.

I think an AI could in principle become good at all of these things at once, could optimize across these wildly different fields to achieve things experts in the individual fields cannot, and could do it all with massive parallelism in order to achieve much more than I could.

Now that's smart.

Personally, most of my intuition here comes from looking at differences within the existing human distribution.

For instance, consider a medieval lord facing a technologist making gunpowder [LW · GW]. That's not even a large tech lead, but it's already enough that the less-knowledgeable human just has absolutely no idea what's going on. Or, consider this example [LW(p) · GW(p)] about some protesters vs a lobbyist. (Note that the first example is more about knowledge, the second more about "intelligence" in a sense closer to "AGI" than to IQ; I expect AGI to exceed top humans along both of those dimensions.)

Bear in mind that there's a filter bubble here - people who go to college and then work in the sort of places where everyone has a degree typically hang out with ~zero people who are on the low end of human intelligence/knowledge/willpower. Every now and then there will be some survey that finds most people can't solve simple problems of type X, and the people who don't really hang out with anyone on the low end of the intelligence/knowledge/willpower curve are amazed that the average person manages to get by at all. And "college degree" isn't even selecting people who are all that far on the high side of the curve. There's a quote I've heard attributed to Murray Gell-Mann (although I can't vouch for its authenticity); supposedly he said to a roomful of physics grad students "You are to the rest of the world as the rest of the world is to fish.". And... yeah, that just seems basically true.

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.

The human brain seems to be a universal learner. There are some concepts that no human can fully grasp, but those seems to be concepts that are too large to fit in the working memory of a human. And humans can overcome those working memory limitations with a pen and paper, a smartphone, a laptop or other technological aids. There doesn't seem to be anything a sufficiently motivated and resourced intelligent human is incapable of grasping given enough time.

Is this true for a human with IQ 70?

Sorry, I actually wanted to ask whether this is true for a human with IQ 80.

Oops, let me try again... is this true for a human with IQ 90?

Okay, I am giving up. Could you please tell me the approximate IQ where this suddenly becomes true, and why exactly? (I mean, why 10 points less than that is not yet universal, but 10 points more cannot bring any advantage beyond saving some time.)

.

To explain: You seem to suggest that there is a black-and-white distinction between intelligences that are universal learners and intelligences that are not. I do not think that all humans are actually universal learners (in the sense of: given eternal youth and a laptop, would invent quantum physics). Do you think they are? Because if they are not, and the concept is black-and-white, then there must be a clear boundary between the humans who are universal learners and the humans who are not, so I am curious where exactly it is. The remaining alternatives are either to admit that no human is a universal learner, or that the concept is actually fuzzy. But if it's fuzzy, then there might be a place for a hypothetical intelligence that is yet more of a universal learner than the smartest human.

Can you predict the shape of a protein from the sequence of its aminoacids? I can't and I suspect no human (even with the most powerful non-AI software) can. There is so much we are unable to understand. Another example is how we still seem to struggle to make advances on Quantum Physics.

I basically agree with your core point — that (reasonably smart) humans are generally intelligent, and there's nowhere further to climb qualitatively than being "generally" intelligent, and that general intelligence is yes/no binary. I've been independently making some very similar arguments: that general intelligence is the ability to simulate any mathematical structure [LW · GW], chunk these structures into memory-efficient abstractions [LW(p) · GW(p)], then perform problem-solving in the resultant arbitrary mathematical environment.

But I think you're underestimating the power of "merely quantitative" improvements: working-memory size, long-term memory size, faster processing speed, freedom from biases and instincts, etc.

• As per Dave Lindbergh's answer, we should expect humans to be as bad at general intelligence as they can get while still being powerful enough to escape evolution's training loop. All of these quantitative variables are set as low as they can get.
  • In particular, most humans are not generally intelligent most of the time [LW · GW], and many probably don't even know how to turn on their "general intelligence" at will. They use cached computations and heuristics instead, acting on autopilot. In turn, that makes our entire civilization (and any given organization in it) not generally intelligent all of the time as well, which would put obvious disadvantages to us in a conflict with a true optimizer.
• As per tailcalled's answer, any given human is potentially a universal problem-solver but in practice has only limited understanding of some limited domains.
• As per John Wentworth's answer, the ability to build abstraction-chains more quickly conveys you massive advantages. A very smart person today would trivially outplay any equally-intelligent caveman, or any equally-intelligent medieval lord, given the same resources and all of the relevant domain knowledge of their corresponding eras. And a superintelligent AI would be able to make as much cognitotech progress over us as we have over these cavemen/medievals, and so trivially destroy us.

The bottom line: Yeah, an ASI won't be "qualitatively" more powerful than humans, so ant:human::human:ASI isn't a precise mechanical analogy. But it's a pretty good comparison of levels of effective cognitive power anyway.

Imagine that some superpowerful Omega, after reading this article, decides to run an experiment. It puts you in a simulation, which seems similar to this universe, except that the resources are magically unlimited there -- new oil keeps appearing underground (until you develop technology that makes it obsolete), the Sun will shine literally forever, and you are given eternal youth. You get a computer containing all current knowledge of humankind: everything that exists online, with paywalls and ciphers removed, plus a scan of every book that was ever written.

Your task it to become smart enough to get out of the simulation. The only information you get from Omega, is that it is possible, and that for someone like Omega it would actually be a piece of cake.

The way out is not obfuscated on purpose. Like, if it is a physical exit, placed somewhere in the universe, it would not be hidden somewhere in the middle of a planet or a star, but it would be something like a planet-sized shining box with letters "EXIT" on it, clearly visible when you enter the right solar system. Omega says to take the previous sentence as an analogy; it is not necessarily a physical place. Maybe it is a law of physics that you can discover, designed in a way such that if you know the equation, it suggests an obvious way how to use it. Maybe the simulation has a bug you can exploit to crash the simulation; that would count as solving the test. Or perhaps, once you understand the true nature of reality as clearly as Omega does, you will be able to use the resources available in the simulation to somehow acausally get yourself out of it; maybe by simulating the entire Tegmark multiverse inside the simulation, or creating an infinite chain of simulations within simulations... something like that. Again, Omega says that these are all merely analogies, serving to illustrate that the task is fair (for a superintelligence); it is not necessarily any of the above. A superintelligence in the same situation would quickly notice what needs to be done, by exploring a few thousand most obvious (for a superintelligence) options.

To avoid losing your mind because of loneliness, you are allowed to summon other people into the simulation, under the condition that they are not smarter than you. (Omega decides.) This restriction exists to prevent you from passing the task fully to someone else, as in: "I would summon John for Neumann and tell him to solve the problem; he surely would know how, even if I don't." You are not allowed to cheat by simply summoning the people you love, and living happily forever, ignoring the fact that you are in Omega's simulation. Omega is reading your thoughts, and will punish you if you stop sincerely working to get out the simulation. (But as long as you are sincerely trying, there is no time pressure, the summoned people also get eternal youth, etc.) Omega will also stop the simulation and punish you, if it would see that you made yourself incapable of solving the task; for example if you would wirehead yourself in a way that keeps you (falsely) sincerely believing that you are still successfully working on the task. The punishment comes even if you wirehead yourself accidentally.

Do you feel ready for the task? Or can you imagine some way you could fail?

There’s a common rebuttal along the lines that an ant is also a universal computer and so can in theory compute any computable program.

Nothing finite, which is to.say nothing, is a universal computer, because there are programmes too big for it..

"There doesn't seem to be anything a sufficiently motivated and resourced intelligent human is incapable of grasping given enough time"

  - a human

If there is such a thing, what would a human observe?

I agree with you. The biggest leap was going to human generality level for intelligence. Humanity already is a number of superintelligences working in cooperation and conflict with each other; that's what a culture is. See also corporations and governments. Science too. This is a subculture of science worrying that it is superintelligent enough to create a 'God' superintelligence.

To be slightly uncharitable, the reason to assume otherwise is fear -either their own or to play on that of others. Throughout history people have looked for reasons why civilization would be destroyed, and this is just the latest. Ancient prophesiers of doom were exactly the same as modern ones. People haven't changed that much.

That doesn't mean we can't be destroyed, of course. A small but nontrivial percentage of doomsayers were right about the complete destruction of their civilization. They just happened to be right by chance most of the time.

I also agree that quantitative differences could possibly end up being very large, since we already have immense proof of that in one direction given that we have superintelligences massively larger than we are already, and computers have already made them immensely faster than they used to be.

I even agree that it is likely that they key advantages quantitatively would likely be in supra-polynomial arenas that would be hard to improve too quickly even for a massive superintelligence. See the exponential resources we are already pouring into chip design for continued smooth but decreasing progress and even higher exponential resources being poured into dumb tool AIs for noticeable but not game changing increases. While I am extremely impressed by some of them like Stable Diffusion (an image generation AI that has been my recent obsession) there is such a long way to go that resources will be a huge problem before we even get to human level, much less superhuman.

I mostly agree, and I want to echo 'tailcalled' that there's another layer of intelligence that builds upon humans: civilization, or human culture (although surely there's some merit to our "architecture", so to speak, to be sure!). We've found that you can teach machines essentially any task (because of Turing completeness). That doesn't mean a single machine, by itself, might warrant being called an 'universal learner'. Such universality would come from algorithms running on said machine. I think there's a degree of universality inherent to animals and hence to humans as well. We can learn to predict and plan very well from scratch (many animals learn with little or no parenting required), are curious for learning more, can memorize and recall things from the past, etc.. 

However, I think the perspective of our integration with society is important. We also probably would not learn to reach remotely similar levels of intelligence (in the sense of the ability to solve problems, act in the world, and communicate) without instruction -- much like the instruction Turing machines receive when programmed. And this instruction has undergone refinement from many generations, through other improvement algorithms (like 'quasi-genetic' improvement of which cultures have the best teaching methods and better outcomes, and of course teachers thinking how to teach best, what to teach, etc.).

I think there's the insight that our brain is universal, simply because yes, we can probably follow/memorize any algorithm (i.e. explicit set of instructions) which fits our memory. But also our culture equips us with more powerful forms of universality where we detect most important problems, solve them, and evolve as a civilization. 

I think the most important form of universality is that of meaning and ethics: dicovering what is meaningful, what activities we should pursue, what is ethical and isn't, and what is a good life. I think we're still not very firmly in this ground of universality, lest the machines we create.