I feel this lacks imagination. In actual fact, a computerised person of average intelligence would be an incredible piece of technology and could easily lead to an AI singularity, given enough funding - which it would probably receive, because holy shit. What happens when you set thousands of average people on a problem, and give them thousands of simulated years to work on it? When you can spin up a research team as easily as an AWS instance?

>but without changing the way that it stores and indexes the information, it can’t make something that can solve problems that it can’t.

And yet people routinely grow up to be smarter than their parents, with no special effort on their parents' part. All you need to make a smarter version of yourself is the ability to make inaccurate copies and dumb luck. What, besides ethics and money, stops you from running an evolutionary process that selects for intelligence at a vastly higher rate than real time?