I'm skeptical that Deutsch actually meant that, but even smart people have crazy ideas.

He wrote a pretty well known article about it that as far as I can tell wasn’t written off-hand and hasn’t been retracted or disavowed. I’m pretty confident he meant it.

There has to be some misinterpretation going on here (or David Deutsch just hasn't thought this through). You can have a quantum computer in a superposition of states, but that isn't many worlds; to have many worlds, the computer has to interact with the outside world and split the outside world into a corresponding superposition of states. Such interaction with the outside world prevents a quantum computer from functioning - and it's precisely such information leakage to the outside world that is a major difficulty when trying to scale up quantum computers.

Which sadly means nothing, so many details being hidden behind the words "general", "intelligence", "running", "quantum computer", "ought", "oberve" and "existing".

If you could refine what these words all mean, I guess we could understand it as something more than "Deutsch seems to think that yes", which can replace your sentence entirely, "yes" describing it all as precisely.

I am myself, in some ways, a general intelligence running on a quantum computer but I dont feel like I can observe myself existing in a novel special way. Let alone being able to then express it for you in a way that is novel as well.

Most of those words don’t cause definitional problems here any more than they do for all other scientific tests which involve general intelligences (humans) making observations about things that exist. “Quantum computer” is a unique term that doesn’t show up in every description of a scientific experiment, but as far as I know it doesn’t have a particularly ambiguous definition.

And while you are indeed a general intelligence, I don’t think you’re running on a quantum computer.

> observe itself existing in parallel worlds if many-worlds is true

If many-worlds is true, we are already observing ourselves in each of those universes in which we can observe, we just don't communicate with our replicas. And if the AGI can communicate with its other instances, the exponential replicas will quickly overload their channel.

I think the point of the claim is that a general intelligence running on a quantum computer would make different observations if many worlds is true versus if many worlds is false.