There’s a difference between “unlimited growth” and “surpassing humans” though. Humans might be intelligent, but it’s fairly easy to think up something that’s more intelligent. Really if you just imagine a being that’s capable of doing the sort of things computers do easily, like storing lots of information, complex calculations, etc, and apply human intelligence to the ability to do amazing mental gruntwork, and there you have it. Say you make a machine that can do the same sort of learning that humans do, but quickly enough to, say, read and understand entire online journal databases in a few months. Or, hell, a few years. It’d be able to cross reference and cite literature in ways no humans could, perform better meta-analysis of past data, and integrate theories from multiple fields to come up with workable real-world solutions humans never could.
You could say that’s a machine that’s as smart as a human, but with larger capacity to store knowledge, and increased speed. But the distinction doesn’t make as much of a difference at that point.
