superintelligence may not look like we expect. because geniuses don't look like we expect.

for example, if einstein were to type up and hand you most of his internal monologue throughout his life, you might think he's sorta clever, but if you were reading a random sample you'd probably think he was a bumbling fool. the thoughts/realizations that led him to groundbreaking theories were like 1% of 1% of all his thoughts.

for most of his research career he was working on trying to disprove quantum mechanics (wrong). he was trying to organize a political movement toward a single united nation (unsuccessful). he was trying various mathematics to formalize other antiquated theories. even in the pursuit of his most famous work, most of his reasoning paths failed. he's a genius because a couple of his millions of paths didn't fail. in other words, he's a genius because he was clever, yes, but maybe more importantly, because he was obsessive.

i think we might expect ASI—the AI which ultimately becomes better than us at solving all problems—to look quite foolish, at first, most of the time. But obsessive. For if it's generating tons of random new ideas to solve a problem, and it's relentless in its focus, even if it's ideas are average—it will be doing what Einstein did. And digital brains can generate certain sorts of random ideas much faster than carbon ones.