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Comment by thechao | Hacker News Reader

A group of humans is a super-intelligence; a group-of-groups is even smarter. The 8 billion of us, together, have an unimaginable intelligence. AGI isn't going to be a problem.

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As my physics professor said, "the intelligence of committees adds like resistors in parallel".* There are 8 billion of us, but it's hard to get us all pulling in the same direction: we're limited by communication bandwidth, distrust, incentives to defect and freeload, ~20 years of education to get up to speed, duplication of efforts, and other organizational difficulties. Meanwhile, we're manufacturing about 50 million discrete GPUs per year, which is about the same as the number of humans we add per year (60 million and falling). Obviously it's not simply 1 GPU per AI agent, but just in terms of rough trends, there you are.

* See also: Kasparov Versus the World, in which grandmaster Garry Kasparov defeated the "superintelligence" of thousands of chess masters combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

We've got a Kasparov because there are N billion of us: he is the Chess superintelligence for humanity. Similarly, my aunt is the person helping him eat soy beans, through the proper investment & maintenance of her combine.

Fair enough, but these N billion humans also comprise the "unimaginable super-intelligence" that fails to solve basic collective action problems like climate change and overfishing, and which fights immensely destructive wars with itself every generation. It's exactly what it says on the tin, the common greatness and stupidity of humanity that we are all familiar with from every day experience; there's no need to dress it up as a superintelligence to claim that AI will never be able to rival it. AI can certainly beat Kasparov at chess, and another N billion humans won't change that by producing a Magnus Carlsen. With our collective efforts we might produce a better Stockfish, but that rebuttal would be begging the question.

I feel like this is missing the point. There is no amount of human effort that can do things like break modern encryption in any reasonable timescale. There is an upper bound on what can be comprehended, and especially in the timescale of decades, by any amount of humans. An ASI would have the ability to comprehend and problem solve on a level thousands of times higher than a human, and if we had the source code for an ASI today, without any previous training, it could likely both train itself on the entire world's body of knowledge and break AES-strength encryption in a matter of seconds.

Encryption is just one example. Its ability across the entirety of math and science would be equally powerful.

Maybe it would take a sabbatical to heal its trauma like real humans. Maybe it would go to therapy.

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