Technology has accumulated through human history, and right now, technology advances extremely rapidly that is the proximate cause, that's why we are currently so very productive.
What we do know is that the ultimate limit to information processing in a machine substrate lies far outside the limits in biological tissue. This comes down to physics. A biological neuron fires, maybe, at 200 hertz, 200 times a second. But even a present-day transistor operates at the Gigahertz.
Neurons propagate slowly in axons, 100 meters per second, tops. But in computers, signals can travel at the speed of light. There are also size limitations, like a human brain has to fit inside a cranium, but a computer can be the size of a warehouse or larger. So the potential for superintelligence lies dormant in matter, much like the power of the atom lay dormant throughout human history, patiently waiting there until 1945. In this century, scientists may learn to awaken the power of artificial intelligence. And I think we might then see an intelligence explosion. We need to think of intelligence as an optimization process, a process that steers the future into a particular set of configurations. A superintelligence is a really strong optimization process.
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