It wasn't a formal model or a theorem, it was an observation about reality. Humans are indeed gradually being overtaken on almost all fronts by AI. But by all means, if you want to take issue with Moravec's framing of the issue, feel free.
Explaining it as something like "realizable instantiation of physical computation occurring in the universe mapping to an ultra-sparse, discrete point cloud embedded in the Euclidean parameter space of all computable functions" could definitely be more precise, but you're either going to need a topology like a landscape or a bumpy sphere to visualize it, and then you're going to need to spend more time showing the effects of things like scaling laws, available compute, where the known boundaries of human intelligence lie, and so on, and so forth, and by then you've lost everyone, probably even the ML professor.
It's a good enough metaphor that maps to a real thing.
> It's a good enough metaphor that maps to a real thing.
My entire point, which I’m not sure you addressed is that no, it’s not a good metaphor. Water “floods” a 3d topology in a predictable manner with regards to the volume the topology can contain. The entire argument is that progress is observable, predictable, and limitless, and the “islands” are a rhetorical device. My argument was turning the rhetorical device around and pointing out that we know so little about intelligence and AI that describing it in this way is not meaningful beyond sounding intellectual.
Explaining it as something like "realizable instantiation of physical computation occurring in the universe mapping to an ultra-sparse, discrete point cloud embedded in the Euclidean parameter space of all computable functions" could definitely be more precise, but you're either going to need a topology like a landscape or a bumpy sphere to visualize it, and then you're going to need to spend more time showing the effects of things like scaling laws, available compute, where the known boundaries of human intelligence lie, and so on, and so forth, and by then you've lost everyone, probably even the ML professor.
It's a good enough metaphor that maps to a real thing.