Comments - Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

I don't think that can be justified, but if I met Yudkowsky at a "Prove me wrong" booth, I'd argue that intelligence is not all it's cracked up to be. If it were, the smartest people would already be running things. There is no reason to think computers with an IQ of 200 would be any more influential on public or industrial policy than humans with IQs of 160. Those humans already encounter an insurmountable impedance mismatch with the rest of society. So in a sense, an AI that just keeps getting dumber might actually have an advantage when it comes to dealing with us. This objection has been rehashed many times; the usual responses are stuff like "160–200 IQ isn't the level of intelligence mismatch we're talking about", "intelligence is just the general ability to figure out how to do stuff so of course more of it is better / more dangerous", "smart people *do* do better in life on average", etc. etc. (Maybe someone else will have a link to where Scott or Eliezer have discussed it in m

I don't think that can be justified, but if I met Yudkowsky at a "Prove me wrong" booth, I'd argue that intelligence is not all it's cracked up to be. If it were, the smartest people would already be running things. There is no reason to think computers with an IQ of 200 would be any more influential on public or industrial policy than humans with IQs of 160. Those humans already encounter an insurmountable impedance mismatch with the rest of society. So in a sense, an AI that just keeps getting dumber might actually have an advantage when it comes to dealing with us. This objection has been r