If intelligence as we know it could ramp up to generally solve all problems, then surely evolution would keep increasing it and we'd all be gods or at least Einsteins by now?
Depends. If a future AI wants to make a civilisation that spans our own entire Solar System then it would have to tackle much more -- in number and complexity -- logistical, religious, political and what-have-you problems. So it might be too much for it as certain problems here on Earth are for us the humans.
However, if we postulate a self-aware AI who is Earth-bound and is having more processing power than a single human brain and has much more efficient algorithms than our own then it really easy follows that this AI would be much much better than us in solving our Earth-bound problems. Like in economy: more income and same expenses equal bigger profit.
> If intelligence as we know it could ramp up to generally solve all problems, then surely evolution would keep increasing it and we'd all be gods or at least Einsteins by now?
Well, we are limited by the physical size of our brains being able to squeeze out of our mother's hips during birth. Same way a future AI would, at least initially, be limited by the available hardware on which it can run, how much power it can consume and if its heat dissipation won't become too much.
However, an AI wouldn't grow in a natural environment, namely where natural limits would hamper an infinite growth. IMO if a private well-funded lab -- or the military -- invest heavily in such an AI they would just keep throwing hardware at it until it becomes efficient enough to be compared to a human and above. From that point on it is very likely it would become smart and proficient enough to optimise itself and start solving age-old problems we never were able to solve so far.
This, to me at least, is the so-called singularity point, in less extreme terms compared to its official meaning. Namely an entity that can optimise itself and achieve engineering perfection much better than what we can do.
I don't think that's something that's clear at all. Men and whales have larger brains than women, on average. Are they proportionally smarter? Without knowing how brains work, it's impossible to say what constraints exist due to size.
Does it really not though? If you watched the movie "Transcendence" you'd presume that a sufficiently [initially] sophisticated AI can decipher our financial markets quite snappily and make a very quick money off of that -- and use those to finance its endeavours. Which is exactly what the AI in this movie did, very successfully too.
My point is, given a much larger and better brain, the intelligence within it can optimise a much larger problem space at once, and that can very easily include resource acquisition as well.