[extropy-chat] Extreme Intelligence

[Lee Corbin]

Could an intelligence exist using our basic human architecture
that could rapidly solve problems far harder than anyone can
solve today?

Here is what I have in mind: suppose first that there is a
canonical way to extend the IQ scale. Then would it be possible
for a set of atoms to exist, human in form, such that using our
same sense organs and with a brain less than twice as large as
ours it would have an IQ high enough to in one week flat
accomplish any of the following?

  * figure out how a fusion energy reactor could be designed,
    and write up specifications sufficiently detailed so that
    the rest of us could build the thing

  * provide a specific outline of how an AGI could be coded-
    up following the outline/design by a good software team
    in six months

  * be able to understand at about normal reading speed any
    book ever written, much as you can easily understand and
    absorb everything being conveyed by a Dick-and-Jane book

Speaking of extending the IQ scale, I have finished yet 
another scandalous and totally un-PC book entitled "Race
Differences in Intelligence" 2006 by Richard Lynn, with
the latest depressing news about human intellectual
differences.  Seems like we have Jews 112, East Asians 105,
Europeans 100, indigenous American Indians and indigenous
Latin Americans 90, blacks in America 85, blacks in Africa
75, Australian Aborigines 62, and Kalahari San 56. (The
last three mentioned would be about 5 points higher but
for nutritional deficiencies, it is estimated.)

Also, it's the judgment of myself and some of my friends 
who've read Kanzi (the amazing bonobo chimpanzee) that he
has the abilities of, perhaps, a four-year-old, which would
put him at about IQ 25 on the human scale!


Have you ever fleetingly thought "Tom is twice as smart as
Sam", Tom and Sam being two of your acquaintances, only to
bring yourself up short by recalling that such multiples
are really meaningless? Sometimes it has seemed to me that
people of IQ 140 are about twice as smart as those at 120,
and so on. But the suggestive numbers above (genius bonabo
25, Kalahari San 56, Jew 112) actually derive from human
age chronology: after all, IQ originally meant Intelligence
Quotient, and invited us to consider---with rather amazing
reliability and consistency---the average eight-year-old as
being in some sense twice as smart as a four-year-old.

Sometimes the social statisticians and the psychometricians
do accomplish miracles of deduction by extreme attention to
detail and comparison of many, many different results. But
I wonder if there will be any hope of extending measures of
cognitive ability above and beyond the human range. Perhaps,
if the age/developmental ability of such a creature could
be made parallel to human development.

Lee