Seems to me the "killer app" is not superintelligence per se, but superintelligence plus self-modification. With highly intelligent people that problem is often that they can't modify themselves, so in addition to their high intelligence they also have some problems they can't rid of.
Maybe Kasparov plays chess because he genuinely believes that playing chess is the most useful thing he could ever do. But more likely there are other reasons; for example he probably enjoys playing chess, and the more useful things are boring to him. Or maybe he is emotionally insecure and wants to stay in an area he is already good at, because he couldn't emotionally bear giving up the glory and starting something as a total newbie, even if a few years later it would pay off. (This is just a random idea; I have no idea what Kasparov really is like. Also, maybe he is doing other things too, we just don't know about them.)
Imagine a person who would be able to edit their own mind. For example, if they would realize that their plans would advance further if they had better social skills, they would (a) temporarily self-modify to enjoy scientifically studying social skills, then (b) do a research about social skills and find out what is evidence-based, and finally (c) self-modify to have those traits that reliably work. And then they would approach every obstacle in the same way. Procrastinating too much? Find the parts of your mind that make you do so, and edit them out. Want to stay fit, but you hate exercising? Modify yourself to enjoy exercising, but only for a limited time every day. Want to study finance, but have a childhood emotional trauma related to money? Remove the trauma.
You would get a person who, upon seeing an optimal way, would start following that way. They would probably soon realize that their time is a limited resource, and start employing other people to do some work for them. They would use various possible computer tools, maybe even employ people to improve those tools for them. They would research possibilities of self-improvement, use them for themselves, and also trade the knowledge with other people for resources or loyalty. After a while, they would have an "army" of loyal improved followers, and would also interact a lot with the rest of the world. And that would be just a beginning.
Maybe for a human there would be some obstacle, for example that the average human life is too short to research and implement immortality. Or maybe they would reach the escape velocity and become something transhuman.
Most savants simply don't care about changing the world
I would guess they still find some things frustrating (e.g. when someone or something is interrupting them from their hobby), they are just no strategic enough to remove all sources of frustration. Either they do not bother to plan long-term, or they don't believe such long-term planning could work.
the 190 IQ son of a waiter is probably a cook
Let's imagine a country with a strict caste system, where the IQ 190 person born in the lower caste must remain there. If the society is really protected against any attempts to break the system, for example if the people from the lower caste are forbidden all education and internet, and are under constant surveillance, there is probably not much he could do. But if it's a society more or less like ours, only it is illegal and socially frowned upon hiring people to do other caste's work, a strategic person could start exploring possibilites to cheat -- for example, could they fake a different, higher-caste identity? Or perhaps move to a country without the caste system. Or if there are exceptions where the change of caste is allowed, they would try one, and could try to cheat to get the exception easier. (For example, if a higher-caste person can "adopt" you into their caste, you could try to make a deal with one, or blackmail one, or maybe somehow fake the whole process of being adopted.) They could also try to somehow undermine the caste system; create a community that ignores the caste rules; etc.
Hm, that is a better point, it seems then most of my objections are just to the wording. Most intelligent people are also shy etc. and that is why they end up being math researchers instead of being Steve Jobs. If an intelligent person could edit in his mind courage, dedication, charme... that would be powerful.
But I think self-modification would be powerful even without very high IQ, 120 would already make one pretty succesful.
Or is it more IQ being necessary for efficient self-modification?
My point is, this sounds like a powerful combination, but probabl...
Edit: Some people have misunderstood my intentions here. I do not in any way expect this to be the NEXT GREAT IDEA. I just couldn't see anything wrong with this, which almost certainly meant there were gaps in my knowledge. I thought the fastest way to see where I went wrong would be to post my idea here and see what people say. I apologise for any confusion I caused. I'll try to be more clear next time.
(I really can't think of any major problems in this, so I'd be very grateful if you guys could tell me what I've done wrong).
So, a while back I was listening to a discussion about the difficulty of making an FAI. One of the ways that was suggested to circumvent this was to go down the route of programming an AGI to solve FAI. Someone else pointed out the problems with this. Amongst other things one would have no idea what the AI will do in pursuit of its primary goal. Furthermore, it would already be a monumental task to program an AI whose primary goal is to solve the FAI problem; doing this is still easier than solving FAI, I should think.
So, I started to think about this for a little while, and I thought 'how could you make this safer?' Well, first of, you don't want an AI who completely outclasses humanity in terms of intellect. If things went Wrong, you'd have little chance of stopping it. So, you want to limit the AI's intellect to genius level, so if something did go Wrong, then the AI would not be unstoppable. It may do quite a bit of damage, but a large group of intelligent people with a lot of resources on their hands could stop it.
Therefore, what must be done is that the AI cannot modify parts of its source code. You must try and stop an intelligence explosion from taking off. So, limited access to its source code, and a limit on how much computing power it can have on hand. This is problematic though, because the AI would not be able to solve FAI very quickly. After all, we have a few genius level people trying to solve FAI, and they're struggling with it, so why should a genius level computer do any better. Well, an AI would have fewer biases, and could accumulate much more expertise relevant to the task at hand. It would be about as capable as solving FAI as the most capable human could possibly be; perhaps even more so. Essentially, you'd get someone like Turing, Von Neumann, Newton and others all rolled into one working on FAI.
But, there's still another problem. The AI, if left for 20 years working on FAI for 20 years let's say, would have accumulated enough skills that it would be able to cause major problems if something went wrong. Sure, it would be as intelligent as Newton, but it would be far more skilled. Humanity fighting against it would be like sending a young Miyamoto Musashi against his future self at his zenith i.e. completely one sided.
What must be done then, is the AI must have a time limit of a few years (or less) and after that time is past, it is put to sleep. We look at what it accomplished, see what worked and what didn't, and boot up a fresh version of the AI with any required modifications, and tell it what the old AI did. Repeat the process for a few years, and we should end up with FAI solved.
After that, we just make an FAI, and wake up the originals, since there's no point in killing them off at this point.
But there are still some problems. One, time. Why try this when we could solve FAI ourselves? Well, I would only try and implement something like this if it is clear that AGI will be solved before FAI is. A backup plan if you will. Second, what If FAI is just too much for people at our current level? Sure, we have guys who are one in ten thousand and better working on this, but what if we need someone who's one in a hundred billion? Someone who represents the peak of human ability? We shouldn't just wait around for them, since some idiot would probably just make an AGI thinking it would love us all anyway.
So, what do you guys think? As a plan, is this reasonable? Or have I just overlooked something completely obvious? I'm not saying that this would by easy in anyway, but it would be easier than solving FAI.