> predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the end that is the limiting factor

I feel much of humanity's effectiveness comes from ablating the complexity of the world to make it more predictable and easier to plan around. Basically, we have certain physical capabilities that can be leveraged to "reorganize" the ecosystem in such a way that it becomes more easily exploitable. That's the main trick. But that's circumstantial and I can't help but think that it's going to revert to the mean at some point.

That's because in spite of what we might intuit, the ceiling of non-intelligence is probably higher than the ceiling of intelligence. Intelligence involves matching an intent to an effective plan to execute that intent. It's a pretty specific kind of system and therefore a pretty small section of the solution space. In some situations it's going to be very effective, but what are the odds that the most effective resource consumption machines would happen to be organized just like that?