You can kind of prove it is possible, can't you? I mean, we have ourselves, which we're sort of claiming is the ground truth comparison to "intelligence". You can then see that the average human actually have limited intelligence, when you look at say, savants or hyper-intelligent people. Then it must be that some physical structure of people's bodies enables this higher degree of intelligence, and removes the "limit" so-to-speak. The average brain has 86 billion neurons, which we know are mostly responsible for piecing together consciousness.

We also have extensive studies on all the ways we are actually really bad at processing input (a by-product of our primate ancestral heritage). There are entire textbooks on all of the different biases we have built-in. And there are clear and obvious limits to our perception, as well (I'm thinking of the five senses here).

Imagine you're neither constrained on the input side or the processing side of this equation. It becomes kind of a mathematical inevitability that we will be able to create artificial intelligence. When anything can be tokenized and act as an "input", and we can run that through something that can process it in the same way that our brains can, only scaled up 10-fold (or more)...

If there is one thing we're good at, it is thinking that we are the center of the universe. I think that is blinding people to the possibility of AI. We can't fathom it, for lots of good and bad monkey reasons.