To be perfectly clear, my point wasn't that people have near-supremal intelligence (the thing you seem to be arguing against), but that given the hypotheses in

To be perfectly clear, my point wasn't that people have near-supremal intelligence (the thing you seem to be arguing against), but that given the hypotheses in the parent comment you couldn't rule out such an eventuality. While we're on the topic though, no it doesn't have to be unlikely or strange for people to be near-supremal, and throwing more hardware at the problem doesn't necessarily make it go away: On some level that idea comes down to defining what we mean by "intelligence." Suppose we can only measure intelligence by proxy by measuring performance on specific tasks. Then the composition of those tasks plays into any final intelligence score. If they're all fully parallelizable then you're totally right that people almost certainly aren't anywhere near the "top," and moreover a "top" probably wouldn't even exist. In standard parlance though, intelligence is something more than the ability to add a lot of numbers quickly, and most of our current measures of intelligence have exponentially (or worse) diminishing returns as more hardware is added. In that latter case where intelligence is measured by performance on algorithms which are fundamentally hard, people wouldn't be near the top because of some rare process which accidentally made us that way. People would be near the top because _anything_ displaying a modicum of thought would be near the top because of the vastly diminishing returns of additional hardware. As a crude ballpark, if you mustered every atom on earth into its own processor running at 4GHz then you could solve a fully parallelizable exponential problem roughly 4x bigger than what one of Google's newest TPU's can manage.