What you can never ever know

So apparently there is a limit to knowledge, to life, to many things. The limit is expressed as assuming that even if you were going as fast as possible (light speed usually), you could still not catch up to some thing that is already moving or preventing movement at the speed of light.

Huh?

Ok so lets start with the big bang, apparently it happened some time ago, and apparently it’s still going, and apparently it’s not stopping any time soon (ever?). So unless you are already close enough to interact with the edge, it will race away from you too quickly to ever reach. The best you can hope for is very old light from the edge reaching us to show what it looked like a long time ago, but you couldn’t actually talk to anyone there or reach anyone there, because the space between is growing faster than your best travel speed. So the universe isn’t infinite, but it might as well be, and so unfortunately you will not ever be able to say hi to everyone in the universe - this is particularly bad for any completionists out there.

woah dude

So ok spatially this is understandable, and yeah maybe someone comes up with faster than light travel or something, would be cool, much fun. But I’m wondering if something similar happens with intelligence? Can something learn or grow in intelligence so fast that someone at a lower level of intelligence could never catch up? A trivial example might appear to be say comparing a puppy with a human, eventually the human starts learning at a rate greater than the puppy and the dog never catches up right? but that’s not quite the same because in both cases they kinda cap out on learning - and sure there are a bunch of things about different types of learning and fluid vs crystallized intelligence. In the spatial analogy though you can just continue to move along the distance at full speed, whereas our example features both the dog and human tapering off in growth.

I think the better analogy might be dogs as a species compared to humans as a species. There you could probably argue that humans are learning faster than dogs could ever catchup.

So then what about ai? If recursive super intelligence begins (arguably it’s being bootstrapped right now), will the intelligence growth reach a rate where the entire species of humans can just not catch up?

Recently there was a flurry of math problems solved by ai, and amongst many concerns was the idea that ai might pump out proofs faster than humans can review them. We could nitpick whether a math proof is a unit of intelligence I guess, but whatever noun you want to use to describe this acquisition of reusable knowledge - I think the inability for humans to easily reuse the knowledge as fast as it is produced by ai, is tantamount to ai escape velocity.

Imagine a world where ai is just charging ahead on research, we asked it for something like fusion or immortality or faster-than-light space travel, but very quickly it is producing results that we need to spend time just to understand, and that act of understanding is required to understand the next thing it produces. In the same way we need to learn arithmetic before we learn algebra before we learn calculus. Pretty quickly we might find ourselves with quite a lot of homework just to be able to understand the technologies being discovered, before we can even use them.