Steven Pinker in Shtetl-Optimized:
While I defend the existence and utility of IQ and its principal component, general intelligence or g, in the study of individual differences, I think it’s completely irrelevant to AI, AI scaling, and AI safety. It’s a measure of differences among humans within the restricted range they occupy, developed more than a century ago. It’s a statistical construct with no theoretical foundation, and it has tenuous connections to any mechanistic understanding of cognition other than as an omnibus measure of processing efficiency (speed of neural transmission, amount of neural tissue, and so on). It exists as a coherent variable only because performance scores on subtests like vocabulary, digit string memorization, and factual knowledge intercorrelate, yielding a statistical principal component, probably a global measure of neural fitness.
In that regard, it’s like a Consumer Reports global rating of cars, or overall score in the pentathlon. It would not be surprising that a car with a more powerful engine also had a better suspension and sound system, or that better swimmers are also, on average, better fencers and shooters. But this tells us precisely nothing about how engines or human bodies work. And imagining an extrapolation to a supervehicle or a superathlete is an exercise in fantasy but not a means to develop new technologies.
More here.