[ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-10-14 08:29, John Grigg wrote:
> What do you think?  This reminds me of Robert Bradbury's desire to 
> grant fifty extra I.Q. points to every person on Earth, to improve 
> society.

It is a bit of a naive extrapolation, but I like how they actually 
mention and sidestep the problem that the IQ scale doesn't do doublings. 
Overall, sounds a bit like my own handwaving when interviewed by media 
about enhanced societies. I think we have good reasons to think they 
will be richer, safer, nicer and more turbulent. The point about 
personality mattering is very true: intelligence is multiplicative with 
motivation, neither can substitute for the other.

The "twice as intelligent" problem is actually a bit subtle. My own 
favorite approach for comparing intelligence would be to use something 
like chess Elo ratings: you run random "games" and estimate the 
probability that individual A will beat individual B. If it is 50% they 
have the same rating, if it is 64% higher A is 100 points higher, and so 
on. This way you could compare even superintelligences (who would have 
win probabilities against non-superintelligences close to 100%) by 
looking at a possibly hypothetical chain of intermediate minds, getting 
a score.

Still, such a score doesnt tell you what you can do. X points does not 
necessarily imply figuring out peace in the Middle East or how to make a 
stardrive is doable. And the above scale does assume you have a core 
general intelligence that can easily work on all domains; in reality we 
tend to specialise a lot, and certain styles are better at certain things.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University