>Unless you believe in something supernatural providing extra computational capacity, we know that the physical limits allows the manufacture of a sub 20W computational device in about 1.5kg of matter with the capacity of a human brain.
(I point out that there is a lot of evidence that the size of the brain in the human has little to do with the IQ of that human. It's not at all clear that you could scale something that works on whatever principles the human brain works on by adding more neurons the way you can scale a transistor based computer by adding more transistors.)
If the self-improving AI stops when it reaches human intelligence, that's amazing, but it's not the singularity.
What I'm saying is that the 'hard takeoff' theory is wrong because making a thing that can make smarter copies of itself... isn't going to mean you get something infinitely smart. It means that you get something that bumps up against the limits of whatever technologies it can use or discover.
Yeah, maybe we'll come up with some new tech that makes slightly-better-than-human brains possible, and those brains will come up with a technology that makes god-brains possible... but there's no evidence at all that what we'd perceive as a god-level intelligence is even possible.
We have no idea how close to the theoretical limit the brain is.
>It may be impossible to reach the same using silicon, but we know it is possible to get there somehow within those constraints.
To get to a human-level intelligence, sure. I'm not saying that AGI is completely impossible, just that a hard takeoff to god-intelligence AGI before we wipe ourselves out or die from other causes is... unlikely.
really, my most important point is that human-level AGI does not necessarily lead to that AI creating smarter copies of itself until we get to the singularity /because physical limits exist/
(I mean, I guess then you are placing your bets on where those physical limits are)