> We don't even know if or to what degree 'super-intelligence' is possible. For all we know, there may be fundamental trade offs between the different skills ne

> We don't even know if or to what degree 'super-intelligence' is possible. For all we know, there may be fundamental trade offs between the different skills necessary for general intelligence that may provide functional limits to the degree to which intelligence can be super human. While this is true, it would be extremely surprising if evolution's first stab at higher intelligence (humans) came anywhere near the theoretical limits of what intelligence could be if directly selected for. Just remove the size and energy consumption constraints imposed on the human brain by what the human body can support, and you should be able to get a significant improvement without changing the base architecture much at all. Digitize and allow for copy/paste of "brains", and now you've got 30,000,000 copies of Einstein working together on problems but each specializing in their own pursuits, each of which doesn't get tired and lives forever, and can open very high-throughput direct neural communication channels with the other Einsteins whenever they need to share knowledge. Start tweaking the virtual brain's "chemical" environment, and you can probably supercharge them by doing all sorts of stuff that would kill a real human but is fine when all you care about is making a simulated brain work better (virtual megadoses of Ritalin, massive tweaks to neurotransmitter behaviors, etc.). These are just a few obvious ideas, but it's hard to imagine that together they couldn't scale intelligence up at least past the point where we could ever hope to keep up, as long as we got it into digital form in the first place. You're correct that there will be an architectural "wall" somewhere, but chances are that human intelligence is more in the "vacuum tubes and punch cards" regime than the "Moore's law is done" one. Whatever is there when that wall is hit would be so far beyond us that it might as well be called super-intelligent, even if it can't improve further.