Plenty of room above us

humans have "mastered" any of the critical items that determine intelligence. Machines beat us at games and solving

I've heard (citation needed) that modern hardware is almost exclusively designed by machines. Humans just specify the design parameters and the machines figure out the details.

Machines are good at these problems because they use a well understood algorithm, and then apply a lot of computational resources to these problems.

There are mathematical limits to the performance of most algorithms, for example, sorting a list takes O(n log n) time. This is mathematically impossible to beat using classical computers. Quantum computers could sort faster, but they have a different limit as well.

Humans are intellegintent because we are effective at solving difficult problems using limited computational resources. Outperforming some due to unlimited computational resources is not the same thing as intelligence. It's like the difference between being tall and being skilled at basketball. 12 foot tall giants who were unskilled would beat the pros at basketball simply because their verticals could not reach the passes the giants could make. That does not mean the giants will be skilled.

Eventually machines may figure out how to be metaphorically skilled basketball players, but any improvements over human accomplishments in this arena will be very small and very incremental.

It seems to me like humans have discovered unique algorithms that we apply to tasks that have allowed us to do things like be creative or discover advanced mathematics.

Machines may learn to execute these algorithms, but my proposition is that they won't exceed our efficiency by very much.

Machines may also discover unique algorithms that can be used for doing things we have never considered before, but I'm suggesting that these new algorithms wouldn't seem very important to us.

I guess my main issue is that intelligence is a very vague way to talk about or compare cognitive abilities.

We label people intelligent because of great accomplishments, when in reality their cognitive capabilities were probably undistinguishable from the large number of intelligent but unaccomplished individuals out there.

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