‘People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.’ –George Bernard Shaw
Yes, we can imagine someone so smart that he can make himself smarter, which in turn allows him to make himself smarter still, until he becomes so smart we lesser intelligences can’t even understand him anymore. […]
1. If you take a thorough look at actually existing creatures, it’s not clear that smarter creatures have any tendency to increase their intelligence. This is obvious if you focus on standard IQ: High-IQ adults […] don’t get any smarter as time goes on. […]
2. In the real-world, self-reinforcing processes eventually asymptote. So even if smarter creatures were able to repeatedly increase their own intelligence, we should expect the incremental increases to get smaller and smaller over time, not skyrocket to infinity.
