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> What is it that super intelligence is supposed to be able to do that cannot otherwise be done?

Find patterns a human would never be able to. Find winning strategies we could not predict. Building models that don't fit a human brain.

An example would be recent AlphaGo matches: AlphaGo wins. We don't know how it wins, we can't predict it's strategy, we just know it wins.

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Humans use tools to find patterns. Typically you don't read a dataset and look for patterns. We build optimisations, regression models, search algos, etc. We also build functions that build functions from data. Yes, we know how AlphaGo wins. It's architecture is known and understood, as is it's training and how to replicate it. It doesn't mean you can predict what it's next move will be nor "why" it made it but it does what it was programmed to do.

This is all just an expression of innately human capability. Bigger and faster does not mean different in kind.

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