RE: COMP: AI substrate

Diana Harris (HarrisInvesco@webtv.net)
Tue, 27 Jul 1999 08:50:56 -0700 (MST) 

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You may want to check out the 6/6/99 'Ask Marilyn' column which appears in the Parade section of most Sunday papers. Ms. Vos Savant (a MENSA member herself) addresses the law of diminishing returns relative to increased IQ. (Bottom line, the law applies here as well, once you have some base level of relatively high intelligence-any more fails to help you very much in the real world.) 

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Message-ID: <65FD40142926D011AAB208002BE22D3201FCDF8C@mailcivic1.actew.oz.au> From: "O'Regan, Emlyn" <Emlyn.ORegan@actew.com.au> To: "'extropians@extropy.com'" <extropians@extropy.com> Subject: RE: COMP: AI substrate
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 19:59:11 +1000
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> > My feeling is that people stumbled onto some cultural and physical
> > changes which set up specific incentives for greater intelligence -
> > bipedalism, the use of spears, fire, tools, etc. This brought us up
> > to IQ 100. But that was smart enough for these purposes. IQs of
> > 130 or 150 wouldn't make someone any better at using these tools.
>
Take a choice between losing say 40 IQ points, or losing an arm (where somehow you didn't die of blood loss/infection). What would be worse for a "human in the wild" (ie: hunter gatherers, although I suspect high tech civ is actually the native environment for humans).

I'd lean toward the IQ being far more detrimental. With high IQ and one arm, you could be the leader, and you could invent interesting ways of getting along. With two arms and brain damage, you are a pawn in someone else's army.

Emlyn, monkey boy

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