Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered la…
While a 2 dimensional projection of intelligence may be a satisfying rhetorical device, I think it’s an extremely mathematically naive interpretation. Not only is intelligence probably most accurately modeled as something extremely high dimensional, it’s probably also extremely nonlinearly traversed by learning methods, both organic and artificial. Not a topology very easily “flooded”. In other words: bull shit.
Explaining it as something like "realizable instantiation of physical computation occurring in the universe mapping to an ultra-sparse, discrete point cloud embedded in the Euclidean parameter space of all computable functions" could definitely be more precise, but you're either going to need a topology like a landscape or a bumpy sphere to visualize it, and then you're going to need to spend more time showing the effects of things like scaling laws, available compute, where the known boundaries of human intelligence lie, and so on, and so forth, and by then you've lost everyone, probably even the ML professor.
It's a good enough metaphor that maps to a real thing.