[ExI] 1DIQ: an IQ metaphor to explain superintelligence

[Adrian Tymes]

I've been thinking about that video that claimed a superintelligence can
always perfectly outthink any lesser intelligence, such as a human.  The
assumption of narrative godmodding aside, intelligence just doesn't work
like that.  I think I may have come up with an imperfect but simple
metaphor to explain this.

I have been a member of Mensa since a young age.  While it has been a while
since my IQ was measured (and I do not trust the free online tests), let us
say my IQ is around 150: not the record highest ever, but comfortably into
the top 2%.  So I am speaking from the experience of having lived with high
intelligence.

In cases where just your IQ applies, it's like rolling a die, with sides
numbered from 1 to your IQ.  (Skills and training also factor in.  I'm
nowhere near as good at fixing a car as a trained auto mechanic, for
instance, regardless of our relative IQs.  But here we'll ne comparing me
to hypothetical AIs where both of us have access to the same database - the
Internet - and some training on relevant skills.)

I will, on average for such matters, roll higher than someone with IQ 100.
This means I come up with the better answer: more efficient, more often
correct, et cetera.  (This does not apply to subjective matters, such as
politics, which shows one weakness of using just IQ to measure all
intelligence, and why some speak of multiple kinds of intelligence.  But
here we'll be looking into tactics, technology planning, and so on where
there usually is an objectively superior answer.)

But not always.  Sometimes I'll roll low and they'll roll high.  I know
this.  Any AI that's as smart as I am, and ran for long enough to gain such
experience, would know this too.  (The video's scenario started with the AI
running for many subjective years.)

>From what I have seen, IQ may be partly about physical architecture but
also largely depends on heuristics and optimizations: it is literally
possible to "learn" to be smarter, especially for young children whose
brains are still forming.  For an AI, we can map this to its hardware and
software: a single-chip AI might be a million times smarter than an average
human, and then run on a million GPUs.

>From what I have seen, IQ is not linear.  It's closer to log-based.  Twice
as smart as me would not be IQ 300; it would be far closer to 151.  (I
don't know if that is the exact scaling, but for this metaphor let's say it
is.)  1,000, or 10^3, is approximately 2^10, so a thousand-fold increase in
intelligence corresponds to a 10-point IQ increase by this metric.

So, that "million by million" AI I just described would only be IQ 140.
Let's toss another million in there somewhere, or change both of those
"million"s to "billion"s, either way getting to IQ 160.

This IQ 160 AI will outthink me on average, but not always - not
perfectly.  Further, the AI in the video wanted to be the only AI.  2% of
humanity is in the tens of millions.  Even if we can only take our maximum
collective roll, not adding our dice or anything, that AI will rarely
outroll all of us - and it needs to do so several times in a row, reliably,
in the video's scenario.  Otherwise, we figure out the AI is doing this,
find a way to purge it, and stop its time bomb, so humanity lives.

Knowing this, the AI would see its survival and growth - the imperatives
that video assumes to explain the AI's actions - as more likely if it works
with humanity instead of opposing it.
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