In his book, Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom discusses the likely scenario in which artificial superintelligence develops in the next century. He explores a number of ways in which this could happen, and concludes that they all point to an inevitable intelligence explosion in the near future.
One possibility that Bostrom does not directly address, however, is that different forms of intelligence will tend to undermine each other. Specifically, two types of intelligence he considers, individual and collective intelligence, may work against each other in pursuit of greater intelligence.
Consider the human brain, a highly intelligent collective, but composed of low-intelligence individuals (neurons). Why wouldn’t evolution have produced significantly more complex neurons, if more intelligent neurons would lead to higher collective intelligence of the brain? One possibility is that intelligent individuals actually tend to undermine the intelligence of the collective.
This makes sense intuitively. More intelligent neurons would be less efficient. For example, if they could understand and interpret a greater diversity of signals, each signal would need to carry more information to distinguish it and remove more ambiguity; a neuron that can interpret (2^n) different signals needs at least (n) bits of information per signal.
We also know that in groups of humans, individual intelligence does not correlate with group intelligence. Instead, it is the emotional intelligence of the group which strongly correlates with group performance, which stands to reason, as emotion is an efficient mode of human social communication.
As such, the collective, if it seeks to augment its own intelligence, will suppress individual intelligence in pursuit of that aim. Meanwhile the individuals, as they seek to augment their own intelligence, will undermine the intelligence of the collective. These countervailing forces could tend to slow or prevent the rise of a true superintelligence, or lead to cycles of in which collective and individual intelligence trade off which is improving and which decreasing. This dynamic seems important to Bostrom’s position that signs point to the impending rise of some type of superintelligence.