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It seems to me that the progress we are making is in technologies of great generality, computers, AI, and genetics. Once these reach an inflection point, the wo

It seems to me that the progress we are making is in technologies of great generality, computers, AI, and genetics. Once these reach an inflection point, the world will get impossibly weirder than it ever has. Genetically informed iterated embryo selection looks like it could lead to children with higher IQs than any human that has ever lived. Regardless of the ethics, someone somewhere is going to do this. A world where the average kindergartener is learning chromodynamics? Talk about a historical discontinuity. If we get human level artificial intelligence, this again is a historical discontinuity. If we get whole brain emulation, things will get very weird very quickly. We're just now getting good VR. False realities that seem real and immersive. This seems like a much bigger jump than that from radio to television. Maybe we are in a period of stagnation - I'm unsure if this time travel thought experiment is a good means of measuring progress. However, it seems to me the world is about to get much weirder this century.

dogma1138 11y ago
Well hitting a biological limitation wall is most likely a thing that will happen and at that point AI and genetic engineering might will be required for progress to happen but It's not sure if were there yet, and it's not clear if it will be a "hard" stop or a sluggish ride through much while getting there. We have fairly limited understanding on how intelligence works at this point, for example while the general consensus is that average human intelligence has evolved even in the past 1000 years it's still not clear how "smart" would say an AMH from circa 100,000 BCE would compare to us today, and many people believe that with correct nurturing they will be indistinguishable form a modern human born into a "high IQ" family. It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance. On the VR part this isn't a really good example, were getting good VR now because the components are dirt cheap and available so it requires much less R&D effort to develop, all of the current VR trends are software based and they can afford to be because they can get cheap and readily available high performance high resolution screens, accelerators and other components required for VR to work. This is exactly the opposite of say the 90's where the likes of SEGA had to develop side projected micro CRT's and specialized LCD's to make even the basic premise of VR feasible. However if there was sufficient reason to pursue VR then well we would've had gotten it much much sooner. Allot of the technical innovation especially the one that comes to the consumer market is more often than not a perfect combination of available technologies rather than a focused effort. I don't personally see VR as an example of innovation or any meaningful development effort it's probably the best case of using current technology rather than innovating I've seen in the past decade. Heck the VR experience I had as a child in SegaWorld in London 12 years ago impressed me much more than the Oculus Rift 2 SDK i got a year ago. And this might be an issue there might be less of a pressure today to "innovate" than it was before, conflict was always an integral part of our drive for innovation, and it seems that once the 2 leading nations at the time stopped trying to one up eachother things slowed down. We could've had a better particle accelerator than the LHC over 30 years ago if the cold war was still going on, heck the only thing the defense department seems to care these days about cutting edge particle physics is still neutrino detection since it can give them a way to detect nuclear submarines. I for one would not mind if everyone in the world would get a life time dose of the old Soviet Space religion that would inspire everyone to drive for something better, but sadly i think we'll need to have a real impending catastrophe for the bigger nations and the entire planet to start caring about that again. If you build a doomsday clock that would say earth will self destruct in 50 years we will have a mars colony withing 30 because this is how our species works, but as soon as the only thing we care about is the size of the screen it shouldn't surprise you that some innovation stops because those resources are now being direct at quite pointless things.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  >It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance. This is, to put it charitably, not the consensus of the relevant science. Once you get adequate nutrition, which western countries have, IQ if influenced far more by genetics than environment. Adoption studies show consistently that adopted children's IQs resemble their genetic parents not their adopted parents. Twins separated at birth tend to have very similar IQs and personalities. Programs like Head Start and brain training regimens have proven to have little impact on IQ and future outcomes - which you wouldn't expect if environment was the prime factor. We are biological robots, we should expect our source code to have a significant influence on our cognition. The "environment is all that matters" idea is basically Lysenkoism and its popularity is more do to ideology than science. Your statements are from a mirror world. I assure you, you're misinformed.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    To put it charitably that's not the case, the majority of the latest studies show that if you are born to a "low-IQ" (less than 90) then genetics play a huge role (I personally have no quarrel with classifying IQ of 90 or lower as a mental deficiency, but i might have been more clearer on that), however for children who are born to average and above-average parents genetics seems to play a minor role compared to environmental factors especially during the early-adulthood development phases (or exactly before your "IQ" seems to stabilize). Here is an example of a study which is one of the largest (if not the largest) studies that were conducted in this field (over 11,000 individuals) which seem to point to that exact conclusion. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/01/0956797612473119 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/01/095679761247... Overall it seems that if you born with a higher "genetic" IQ than the environment will have a much bigger influence on the final outcome (average to highly gifted) while if you are born with a (considerably) below average genetic IQ potential then it wont. edit: Can't find a non-paywall for the research but there is a high level synopsis and analysis of it for journalists. http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/nature-nurture-intellectual-development-children http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/nat...

dogma1138 11y ago

Well hitting a biological limitation wall is most likely a thing that will happen and at that point AI and genetic engineering might will be required for progress to happen but It's not sure if were there yet, and it's not clear if it will be a "hard" stop or a sluggish ride through much while getting there. We have fairly limited understanding on how intelligence works at this point, for example while the general consensus is that average human intelligence has evolved even in the past 1000 years it's still not clear how "smart" would say an AMH from circa 100,000 BCE would compare to us today, and many people believe that with correct nurturing they will be indistinguishable form a modern human born into a "high IQ" family. It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance. On the VR part this isn't a really good example, were getting good VR now because the components are dirt cheap and available so it requires much less R&D effort to develop, all of the current VR trends are software based and they can afford to be because they can get cheap and readily available high performance high resolution screens, accelerators and other components required for VR to work. This is exactly the opposite of say the 90's where the likes of SEGA had to develop side projected micro CRT's and specialized LCD's to make even the basic premise of VR feasible. However if there was sufficient reason to pursue VR then well we would've had gotten it much much sooner. Allot of the technical innovation especially the one that comes to the consumer market is more often than not a perfect combination of available technologies rather than a focused effort. I don't personally see VR as an example of innovation or any meaningful development effort it's probably the best case of using current technology rather than innovating I've seen in the past decade. Heck the VR experience I had as a child in SegaWorld in London 12 years ago impressed me much more than the Oculus Rift 2 SDK i got a year ago. And this might be an issue there might be less of a pressure today to "innovate" than it was before, conflict was always an integral part of our drive for innovation, and it seems that once the 2 leading nations at the time stopped trying to one up eachother things slowed down. We could've had a better particle accelerator than the LHC over 30 years ago if the cold war was still going on, heck the only thing the defense department seems to care these days about cutting edge particle physics is still neutrino detection since it can give them a way to detect nuclear submarines. I for one would not mind if everyone in the world would get a life time dose of the old Soviet Space religion that would inspire everyone to drive for something better, but sadly i think we'll need to have a real impending catastrophe for the bigger nations and the entire planet to start caring about that again. If you build a doomsday clock that would say earth will self destruct in 50 years we will have a mars colony withing 30 because this is how our species works, but as soon as the only thing we care about is the size of the screen it shouldn't surprise you that some innovation stops because those resources are now being direct at quite pointless things.

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
>It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance. This is, to put it charitably, not the consensus of the relevant science. Once you get adequate nutrition, which western countries have, IQ if influenced far more by genetics than environment. Adoption studies show consistently that adopted children's IQs resemble their genetic parents not their adopted parents. Twins separated at birth tend to have very similar IQs and personalities. Programs like Head Start and brain training regimens have proven to have little impact on IQ and future outcomes - which you wouldn't expect if environment was the prime factor. We are biological robots, we should expect our source code to have a significant influence on our cognition. The "environment is all that matters" idea is basically Lysenkoism and its popularity is more do to ideology than science. Your statements are from a mirror world. I assure you, you're misinformed.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  To put it charitably that's not the case, the majority of the latest studies show that if you are born to a "low-IQ" (less than 90) then genetics play a huge role (I personally have no quarrel with classifying IQ of 90 or lower as a mental deficiency, but i might have been more clearer on that), however for children who are born to average and above-average parents genetics seems to play a minor role compared to environmental factors especially during the early-adulthood development phases (or exactly before your "IQ" seems to stabilize). Here is an example of a study which is one of the largest (if not the largest) studies that were conducted in this field (over 11,000 individuals) which seem to point to that exact conclusion. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/01/0956797612473119 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/01/095679761247... Overall it seems that if you born with a higher "genetic" IQ than the environment will have a much bigger influence on the final outcome (average to highly gifted) while if you are born with a (considerably) below average genetic IQ potential then it wont. edit: Can't find a non-paywall for the research but there is a high level synopsis and analysis of it for journalists. http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/nature-nurture-intellectual-development-children http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/nat...