Comment by evanwise

True, but I think that the results of such a "weak intelligence explosion" (where the linear/sublinear scaling case would be a "strong intelligence explosion"), while still remarkable, would fall far short of some of the expectations placed on general AI by the singularity / superintelligence crowd. For the sake of argument, extrapolating from our current energy consumption using a (simplistic) linear model and some rough back of the envelope calculations, the intelligence required to harness the total energy output of the sun would be 40 trillion times the aggregate intelligence of the entire human species today. Several hundred times just isn't going to cut it. Now, if our ability to harness energy increases exponentially with intelligence, then maybe it could work, but that's just an assumption, and, given that there are hard physical limits on the efficiency of energy generation due to thermodynamics, seems very unlikely.