Crunching reality?
(or maybe not)
Intelligence is spoken of as if it was a reality cruncher, that once you have it, given enough time, the universe opens up before it and anything is possible. And if that is accepted, then (or so some say) because machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence (because people can imagine it being so), that will be a super-duper reality cruncher.
But before anybody starts super-duper crunching reality, it is worth asking if intelligence even a reality cruncher in the first place? No, not really. The idea comes about from taking the genuine successes of science and technology and wildly extrapolating what might come about from them or what they mean.
To begin with intelligence is not even a reality cruncher. Creativity or even just looking at things in the right way is as much or more important than intelligence. And anyway, intelligence basically just means thinking about and trying to understand things. Whether any attempt to understand will be successful and how much so depends on the concept and the thing in question which one wants to understand.
There are probably many things in nature that are not particularly remote or hidden, but which are still unknown because no one has thought about them in the right way. Especially if there is no money, prestige, or ability to make technology involved, many people have no motivation to think about such things. A civilization on another planet could probably invent things unimaginable to us (and vice versa) because they would think about and perceive the world in a different way.
Also, modelling or theorizing about something in nature, even if the theory is successful for prediction and technology does not mean capturing all there is to capture about it. Relativity is able to model time and space in certain ways. But it is a model. People have sometimes made somewhat grandiose statements that because physics can model time and space quantitatively, then that’s it, we have encapsulated the nature of time and space. But that is a drastic overstatement. A model is a model and reality is reality. It can express something real, but that is far different from capturing all there is.
Likewise, figuring out one thing in nature often leads to more problems, more areas of investigation. Rather than closing the book on a subject, it shows that the book is bigger than was previous thought. And technology also often leads to new problems. Just having a new capability or a new technique can lead to new problems rather than solving old ones. This millennia long history of warfare is an example of that.
Also, even if it is believed that human beings can make a machine more intelligent than them, why should it easily be able to make a machine more intelligent than it. Why should intelligence increase be exponential? There is no reason to think that, except that people want to. It could well be logarithmic, that is, it gets harder and harder to increase intelligence each time. No one actually knows what intelligence or, more properly, reasoning is, in terms of all the possibilities that are out there.
And so there is not really a good reason to believe in the reality crunching paradigm. It does not match history, it does not match the present, and, despite what some say, it will not match the future.