Computers already do things that humans can't on a massive scale. It's not hard to imagine that they could leverage that ability to take AI beyond us.
Did you even read the article?
“This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it’s made of human abilities.” He says comparing ourselves with AI is the equivalent of comparing ourselves with a car. “It’s like saying a car can go faster than a human runner. Of course it can, and yet we don’t say that the car has become a better runner.”
The ML systems are not made of human abilities. They are made of software processes. Jared is a smart and informed guy but that sentence is just nonsensical.
It enters the Olympics and automates away all sprinters? Or it becomes self-aware and decides to eat all the humans?
Or more likely, it gets sold to the military so they can have one more kind of drone that runs on land instead of flies through the air.
It absolutely goes to the military with built-in weapons.
In fuller context, Lanier argues that software using AI won't make human sport or competition useless, because it will use different processes to achieve the same result—the same way that competitive running (or top-level chess, Go, or certain video games) will still happen, even if human inventions can beat the best human at the task.
For all these tasks, the software will take a different process for doing well at the task (e.g. a car doesn't "run," and a chess engine "thinks" differently than a human). In these activities, the process matters.
A different interpretation of the argument is then a bit more interesting. If Lanier is also saying that software using AI won't be better than humans at activities outside of competitions, I would disagree—though to be fair, I don't think this is his argument. For lots of work, the result matters more than the process. If someone wants to make a funny poem as a one-off joke in a story, the result may matter more than the process of production. And if a worker wants to summarize lots of short texts where speed is the most important factor, the result may also matter more than the process. In the same sense, it's still true that a car is usually better at letting humans travel over long distances for work than running, because the result matters more than the process.