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KatjaGrace comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong
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Another way to get at the same point, I think, is - Are there things that we (contemporary humans) will never understand (from a Quora post)?
I think we can get some plausible insight on this by comparing an average person to the most brilliant minds today - or comparing the earliest recorded examples of reasoning in history to that of modernity. My intuition is that there are many concepts (quantum physics is a popular example, though I'm not sure it's a good one) that even most people today, and certainly in the past, will never comprehend, at least without massive amounts of effort, and possibly even then. They simply require too much raw cognitive capacity to appreciate. This is at least implicit in the Singularity hypothesis.
As to the energy issue, I don't see any reason to think that such super-human cognition systems necessarily requires more energy - though they may at first.
If there are insights that some humans can't 'comprehend', does this mean that society would never discover certain facts had the most brilliant people not existed, or just that they would never be able to understand them in an intuitive sense?
There are people in this world who will never understand, say, the P?=NP problem no matter how much work they put into it. So to deny the above you'd have to say (along with Greg Egan) that there was some sort of threshold of intelligence akin to "Turing completeness" that only some of humanity were reached, but that once you reached it nothing was in principle beyond your comprehension. That doesn't seem impossible, but it's far from obvious.
David Deutsch argues for just such a threshold in his book The Beginning of Infinity. He draws on analogies with "jumps to universality" that we see in several other domains.
I think this is in fact highly likely.
I can see some arguments in favour. We evolve along for millions of years and suddenly, bang, in 50ka we do this. It seems plausible we crossed some kind of threshold - and not everyone needs to be past the threshold for the world to be transformed.
OTOH, the first threshold might not be the only one.
If some humans achieved any particular threshold of anything, and meeting the threshold was not strongly selected for, I might expect there to always be some humans who didn't meet it.
"Does this mean that society would never discover certain facts had the most brilliant people not existed?"
Absolutely! If they or their equivalent had never existed in circumstances of the same suggestiveness. My favorite example of this uniqueness is the awesome imagination required first to "see" how stars appear when located behind a black hole -- the way they seem to congregate around the event horizon. Put another way: the imaginative power able to propose star deflections that needed a solar eclipse to prove.
I think a variety of things would have gone unsolved without smart people at the right place and time with the right expertise to solve tremendous problems like measuring the density of an object or learning construction, or how to create a sail that allows ships to sail into the wind.