I have a thought that comes up every time the "super-intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are decreasing returns to increasing smartitude. As a weak

I have a thought that comes up every time the "super-intelligent AI" discussion appears: Maybe there are decreasing returns to increasing smartitude. As a weak form of argument, being three standard deviations better than the average dude is easy and obvious. Being three more is much harder and doesn't produce the same obvious difference. As a stronger form of the argument, Steven Jay Gould had an old essay about a similar idea, in baseball players. In the old days, baseball players were a normal distribution roughly similar to the average population. With modern selection and training, players are piled up against a sort of semi-hard limit at the upper end.