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Evolution has selected for intelligence in us, but has selected for intelligence only to the extent that the trade-offs are worth it. Since such trade-offs (size of birth canal, caloric requirements, etc) exist, it seems supremely unlikely that our level of intelligence is the highest one possible.
And even if von Neumann or Einstein or whichever specific individual you care to name is the absolute highest level of intelligence possible, it should be obvious that the ability to create an arbitrary number of such individuals, who do not need to sleep and who do not need to rest, would be able to produce a higher aggregate intelligence-driven output than humanity.
Human intelligence runs on physical hardware. There is nothing magic about a human mind. Building anything that occurs in nature is just an engineering problem.
A weak assumption, since we have already done so across a wide variety of domains.
The core argument really doesn't hinge on whether LLMs is the path that leads to AGI. If LLMs are a dead end, just replace "invest in LLM" with "invest in Ai research".
Nobody has said anything about the time frame.
Again, nobody said anything about time frame.
But these go together: If human level intelligence isn't the highest possible level of intelligence (and all signs point to "not"), and if there exists technologies or scientific insights that require a higher level of intelligence to discover or make proper use of, then it is trivially true that humans are locked out of such technologies.
The italicized assumption above is the only assumption that isn't trivially true and that is actually necessary for the stunting argument to be true.
Please enumerate the domains in which we have surpassed human level intelligence via AI?
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You've mis-used the word 'trivial'. All those arguments you've made might be true, but none of them are trivially true. They all depend on contingent claims about the world. Any claim that is meaningfully evidence-based cannot be trivial.
At any rate, I read Scott as clearly concerned about time frame. I do not think he is talking about abstract possibilities. Yes, the word 'forever' is in that passage I quoted, but he is plainly talking about short-term technology policy. His view, as far as I can tell, is that we need to 'solve the alignment problem' while creating 'AI' in the immediate short term, or else not make 'AI' at all, and he views the latter option as some sort of permanent stunting of human potential.
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