François Chollet
Nov 27
The impossibility of intelligence explosion
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Conclusions
The expansion of intelligence can only come from a co-evolution of brains (biological or digital), sensorimotor affordances, environment, and culture — not from merely tuning the gears of some brain in a jar, in isolation. Such a co-evolution has already been happening for eons, and will continue as intelligence moves to an increasingly digital substrate. No “intelligence explosion” will occur, as this process advances at a roughly linear pace.
Remember:
- Intelligence is situational — there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole.
- No system exists in a vacuum; any individual intelligence will always be both defined and limited by the context of its existence, by its environment. Currently, our environment, not our brain, is acting as the bottleneck to our intelligence.
- Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — our brains are modules in a cognitive system much larger than ourselves. A system that is already self-improving, and has been for a long time.
- Recursively self-improving systems, because of contingent bottlenecks, diminishing returns, and counter-reactions arising from the broader context in which they exist, cannot achieve exponential progress in practice. Empirically, they tend to display linear or sigmoidal improvement. In particular, this is the case for scientific progress — science being possibly the closest system to a recursively self-improving AI that we can observe.
- Recursive intelligence expansion is already happening — at the level of our civilization. It will keep happening in the age of AI, and it progresses at a roughly linear pace.
https://medium.com/@francois.chollet...n-5be4a9eda6ec
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