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ciphergoth comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong
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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.