
Nick Bostrom on Superintelligence
EconTalk
The Importance of General Intelligence
I think there is a level of general intelligence that becomes effectively universal. Once you have a sufficient level ofgeneral intelligence, you should be able to design new cognitive modules. So if you were an engineering superintelligence and you lacked the ability to understand the poetry, you could use your engineering superintelligence to construct additional mental modules for also being able to understand poetry. I think we can distinguish three different flavors of superintelligence. The easiest one conceptually take a human like mine and just imagine that it operated a million times faster. Then you would have some kind of superintelligence type of thing in that this human mind could achieve things that the human could not do within a given interval of time.