Once you have a general intelligence, you can have something that can recursively improve itself. The first few improvements may be tough for it, but when you

Once you have a general intelligence, you can have something that can recursively improve itself. The first few improvements may be tough for it, but when you consider that it could think 1000s of times faster than humans, you can imagine how this could happen very quickly. And then once you assume that it can recursively improve itself, we enter the realm of "the intelligence with the IQ of 5000." The person with the highest IQ ever was 190 [1]. Imagine the kind of things we could do with an intelligence of 5000. We're talking atomic reassemblers, grand unified theories, and (my dream) a personal paradise Matrix for everyone [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant [2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3183 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3183 Note, this sidesteps all ethical alignment issues. This is assuming that the intelligence is on the same team as us. My thought process is "we're all going to die anyway so let's give it a shot," but a lot of people disagree with me (which is fair).