I think that there is very compelling evidence (but not formal proof) that there is exponential falloff in terms of the ability of parallel networks of intelligent agents to have heightened overall intelligence.

Imagining that there will be near-human IQ AIs that think orders of magnitude more quickly than humans puts the cart before the horse, as well.

Would it not appear as though it was more intelligent simply based on the speed at which it makes decisions?

The Actual Intelligence may be the same (or a little higher) considering the Average Intelligence, but the effect the higher speed would likely be a measurable difference.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. If you can make an AI that's roughly human IQ (even like 80 IQ), but thinks 100x faster than a human, then that's something very much like, if not identical to, "a superhuman AI."

So when you say, "Here's how we'll get superhuman AI: We'll network together bunches of 80 IQ AI's that think 100x faster than a human," it's kind of assuming its own solution.

The 100x faster scenario is not really clear to me. Computers already "think" orders of magnitude faster for some things and orders of magnitude slower in other things. I am not sure this will be all that much more useful than the status quo. Unless they modeling a human brain than I see 100x faster being a useful thing to measure. Otherwise, I don't see speed increases being all that critical to making a superhuman AI.

I think networks of AI can become super powerful even without being nearly as smart as individual humans. AI will only need to approach certain aspects of humans IQ. It can still be much dumb than us in most ways. Most of human progress has been build up because of vague interactions and feedback loops via markets, religions, and nations.

You said that the AIs would be able to "communicate and interact" much faster than humans. If they can't think much faster than humans, then they can't communicate and interact (meaningfully) much faster than humans.

You can think much faster than you can express yourself. You can express yourself much faster than most people can understand you. You can only have a back and forth communication with a tiny number of people at once.

Why would you network them? Just add more ram.

Ask the guy who came up with this scenario. But, obviously, we do at some point find it easier to set up side-by-side computers with (relatively) high-latency connections (like, say, ethernet) than to try to put more computing resources together with low-latency connections (like motherboard busses), for physical reasons.

Reminds me of the story about the galaxy spanning AI in the Dune series. With a latency of 10000 light years between it's various instances.

How did they physically get the machines so far apart in the first place? No wormholes??

They had FTL capable ships. The AI used to sync updates using that.

Same reason why culture matters more than individual IQ. Most of human progress is cause because there are many people learn from each other and making millions of tiny improvements over time.

I don't think it will have heightened measurable intelligence. It will be dramatically more powerful, unpredictable and innovative.

will they?

Adding people to a late project makes it later.

"Adding people to a late project makes it later."

Not all projects are beholden to the rules of the mythical man month.

And even for those that are the primary reason they are is basically the lack of a fast, efficient way to transfer built up institutional knowledge, which may be far less of a factor for AI collaboration.

If I've been working on a project for the past year as the sole developer and I could copy a snapshot of my brain to a portion of your brain that you can access without interrupting me, adding you on as a collaborator is very unlikely to make the project later and very likely to make it go much faster as you could very quickly 'hit the ground running'.

A lot of the problem with the current limits of human intelligence is really bandwidth problems with getting information transferred in and out of our meat brains effectively. Our bandwidth for knowledge import/export is DREADFUL.

AI collaboration (even assuming that bandwidth limitation goes away or is vastly reduced) would still introduce the issue of increased communication requirements, but compared to the initial transfer of acquired knowledge that one isn't as big a deal in my experience and only becomes problematic at great scale.

But if the AI is fast enough, the project will be late much more quickly.

Perhaps more relevantly, I think there's a more basic questionable assumption - the idea that Church-Turing is the best computational basis for AI.

I strongly suspect this is not true - because even after all this time, our best abstract models of computation are still extremely brittle and fragile.

In a hand-wavey sense, as soon as you start allowing for arbitrary inputs and context awareness, you're no longer dealing with a simple Turing architecture but with something else entirely.

The TMs you hear about in your undergrad studies are not even good models for the webserver that served you this comment. Church-Turing is about computing functions over the natural numbers. You can (and usually do) have a Turing complete model of computation in which you can't program Tetris.