Your reply gives me the impression that you are not up to date with Reinforcement Learning. If you did, you would know that the author really understands this domain and was not merely tautological.
"Specialized at being human" - this is a deep intuition. We are reinforcement learning agents that are pre-programed with a certain number of reward responses. We learn from rewards to keep ourselves alive, to find food, company and make babies. It's all a self reinforcing loop, where intelligence has the role of keeping the body alive, and the body has the role of expressing that intelligence. We're really specialized in keeping human bodies alive and making more human bodies, in our present environment.
The author puts a hard limit on intelligence because intelligence is limited by the complexity of the problems it needs to solve (assuming it has sufficient abilities). So the environment is the bottleneck. In that case, an AGI would be like an intelligent human, a little bit better than the rest, not millions of times better.
"Specialized at being human" - this is a deep intuition. We are reinforcement learning agents that are pre-programed with a certain number of reward responses. We learn from rewards to keep ourselves alive, to find food, company and make babies. It's all a self reinforcing loop, where intelligence has the role of keeping the body alive, and the body has the role of expressing that intelligence. We're really specialized in keeping human bodies alive and making more human bodies, in our present environment.
The author puts a hard limit on intelligence because intelligence is limited by the complexity of the problems it needs to solve (assuming it has sufficient abilities). So the environment is the bottleneck. In that case, an AGI would be like an intelligent human, a little bit better than the rest, not millions of times better.