by kragen | 2025-10-08 15:59:38+00:00
Eliezer’s short story “That Alien Message” providing a convincing argument that humans are cognitively limited, not data-limited, through the device of a fictional world where people think faster: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...

> Yes. There is. The theoretical limit is that every time you see 1 additional bit, it cannot be expected to eliminate more than half of the remaining hypotheses (half the remaining probability mass, rather). And that a redundant message, cannot convey more information than the compressed version of itself. Nor can a bit convey any information about a quantity, with which it has correlation exactly zero, across the probable worlds you imagine.

> But nothing I've depicted this human civilization doing, even begins to approach the theoretical limits set by the formalism of Solomonoff induction.

This is also a commonplace in behavioral economics; the whole foundation of the field is that people in general don't think hard enough to fully exploit the information available to them, because they don't have the time or the energy.

——

Of course, that doesn't mean that great intelligence could figure out warp drives. Maybe warp drives are actually physically impossible! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive says:

> A warp drive or a drive enabling space warp is a fictional superluminal (faster than the speed of light) spacecraft propulsion system in many science fiction works, most notably Star Trek,[1] and a subject of ongoing real-life physics research. (...)

> The creation of such a bubble requires exotic matter—substances with negative energy density (a violation of the Weak Energy Condition). Casimir effect experiments have hinted at the existence of negative energy in quantum fields, but practical production at the required scale remains speculative.

——

Cancer, however, is clearly curable, and indeed often cured nowadays. It wouldn't be terribly surprising if we already had enough data to figure out how to solve it the rest of the time. We already have complete genomes for many species, AlphaFold has solved the protein-folding problem, research oncology studies routinely sequence tumors nowadays, and IHEC says they already have "comprehensive sets of reference epigenomes", so with enough computational power, or more efficient simulation algorithms, we could probably simulate an entire human body much faster than real time with enough fidelity to simulate cancer, thus enabling us to test candidate drug molecules against a particular cancer instantly.

Also, of course, once you can build reliable nanobots, you can just program them to kill a particular kind of cancer cell, then inject them.

Understanding this does not require believing that "intelligence that can solve every problem when it reaches a sufficient level, regardless of what data and resources it has to work with", which I think is a strawman you have made up. It doesn't even require believing that sufficient intelligence can solve every problem if it has sufficient data and resources to work with. It only requires understanding that being able to do the same thing regular humans do, but much faster, would be sufficient to cure cancer.

——

There does seem to be an open question about how general intelligence is. We know that there isn't much difference in intelligence between people; 90+% of the human population can learn to write a computer program, make a pit-fired pot from clay, haggle in a bazaar, paint a realistic portrait, speak Chinese, fix a broken pipe, interrogate a suspect and notice when he contradicts himself, fletch an arrow, make a convincing argument in courts, program a VCR, write poetry, solve a Rubik's cube, make a béchamel sauce, weave a cloth, sing a five-minute lullaby, sew a seam, or machine a screw thread on a lathe. (They might not be able to learn all of them, because it depends on what they spend time on.)

And, as far as we know, no other animal species can do any of those things: not chimpanzees, not dolphins, not octopodes, not African grey parrots. And most of them aren't instinctive activities even in humans—many didn't exist 1000 years ago, and some didn't exist even 100 years ago.

So humans clearly have some fairly flexible facility that these other species lack. "Intelligence" is the usual name for that facility.

But it's not perfectly general. For example, it involves some degree of ability to imagine three-dimensional space. Some of the humans can also reason about four- or five-dimensional spaces, but this is a much slower and more difficult process, far out of proportion to the underlying mathematical difficulty of the problem. And it's plausible that this is beyond the cognitive ability of large parts of the population. And maybe there are other problems that some other sort of intelligence would find easy, but which the humans don't even notice because it's incomprehensible to them.