8 ms·

I'm curious for the other folks reading this post and interacting with this thread- do you believe that the logical pathway for expanding human intelligence is

I'm curious for the other folks reading this post and interacting with this thread- do you believe that the logical pathway for expanding human intelligence is with A) Brain-Computer interfaces, B) Through AGI, C) Playing with our genes (e.g. designer babies), D) Something else (and I'd love to hear thoughts)

mlyle 4y ago
The question is ill-posed. What exactly is "human intelligence"? Are you asking me for a normative judgment (e.g. which one is morally correct?) or some kind of positive one (e.g. which one will improve outcome measure X most?) Why are you assuming that it's just one? These choices don't seem mutually exclusive.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like ML Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, I asked about what you thought would be the logical progression (under the assumption that humanity would like to continue to evolve and become more prosperous and becoming more intelligent or building more intelligent tools seems and obvious way to help enable that) Could be more than one, was just trying to give some large buckets, that's why I added D and asked for people to add their thoughts.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like ML Yah, but what is that? Are you talking about an IQ score? Ability to do the tasks that ML is not currently good at isn't a great measure (a few years ago, Go or creating high quality paintings would have qualified). E.g. one example of "D" is "rigorously studying and improving human education". But there's infinite clarification on what the problem you're trying to solve before we agree what improvement is: * Mean, median, or peak outcomes? * Performance on a given curriculum, or on a given abstract class of problems? Does creativity count? Is an education system that improves various kinds of quantitative metrics by 20% but results in a 5% less creative and flexible population a "win" or not? Pretty much all the same arguments apply no matter which approach you consider. > Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, Well, normative considerations are important. If experimenting with brain-computer interfaces for quick advancement harms humans, is it a "good path"? How do we compare these paths? Quickness, magnitude of results, "best" resulting society, least harms, some kind of cost measure?
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      Why should this discussion play out again and again in this exact form is beyond me. It's always the same troupe of beaten up arguments trying to pass while being expressed in academia-flavored rhetorics, is it the canon critical thinking essay tone they teach in the US? Insofar as the grandparent post contained some useful inquiry this should amount to uncharitable derail. So often this blows up when anything related to IQ is brought up, a profound generational trauma of american intellectualism gets a small scene to replay its discourse in suffocating detail. Maybe this is as close to the root cause as we can publicly get? Our insane tendency to avoid productive discussion and stifle true creative activity, all in favor of hollow wordplay (quasi-statistical if the situation requires, not less hollow). Our education - a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it (going against all solid evidence to the contrary, because the doctrine of never having enough education has to be preached). There is a word for this, and it is a neologism: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
      - mlyle 4y ago
        I don't like the way you are talking to me, and I especially don't like that you may not have read carefully enough to understand that parts may be agreeing with you. > a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it Drilling tons of math in rigorous ways for excessive amounts of time clearly improves various kinds of outcome measures. It also tends to cause other harms. If we want to improve intelligence, first we need to agree what intelligence is. Then we can talk about what measures are appropriate or ethical to use to try and improve it. Even if we just take a somewhat stupid measure, and say "all we care about is a hybrid of IQ and SAT-I scores at age 16"-- there's still the question of whether we care more about moving the top performance upwards or the entire distribution. If we don't agree what intelligence is, we can't answer questions like this. If we use a traditional measure like IQ as a measure of G factor-- I don't think brain-computer interfaces are going to swing things much and they may even make it worse. (But they could also allow explosions in human productivity or quality of life that are not measured on that scale). e.g. Smartphones have not made us smarter, but they may sometimes allow us to do smarter and better things.
  - NhanH 4y ago
    Just to expand on the part of “ill defined question”. “Human intelligence” might not be a scale that goes up and down, so it’s a bit hard to say for sure. There is probably at least a tradeoff of flexibility vs specialization. There is also physical constraint where intelligence might be limited due to the whole brain/ machine becoming a distributed system (and you can’t have proper single point consciousness, for example). Though we don’t even know if consciousness is related to intelligence.
causi 4y ago
C is the most practical in the short term, because we don't have to understand the brain all that well to find out how to tell an embryo to make it bigger and denser. It will involve a lot of failures.
colechristensen 4y ago
If you didn't suffer from the presence of a moral code, gene editing babies for intelligence is something you could do today, or if not, with a month or two of preparations and waiting for suppliers. I would bet that it is possible to expand actual consciousness into connected hardware (silicon or engineered nervous tissue), and have that hardware expand a metric you would call intelligence. The most reasonable thing in a third direction would be improving brain development through specific training in childhood and training as an adult. A lot of intelligence comes down to how the brain organizes itself in response to inputs, and a scientific discipline to optimize this could make a lot of progress. Not that work isn't being done along these lines but I think there is a lot of room to grow here.
nonameiguess 4y ago
If you eliminate the "G" in AGI to include any mechanical, electrical, or otherwise automated non-human computational processes we can use to augment our own brain's limitations, i.e. calculators, slide rulers, all the way up to Wikipedia, then AI is clearly the answer so far. Even just books and language, augmenting human intelligence by parallelizing thinking across many humans and not losing knowledge upon death, are huge wins. But for the far future, all of the above seems like a good answer. At least one "something else" is the possibility of nutritional, electrical, or biochemical interventions that can increase brain function without needing to change our genes. Caffeine and beta blockers seem like the best things we've got so far, along with not being in a state of persistent starvation, but there are presumably ways we can do better.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
C) you don’t even have to know which genes boost intelligence to know that kids from smart parents are more likely to be intelligent. Akademgorodok was a concentration of very smart Russian scientists and turned into an (accidental?) eugenics program producing a new generation of smart kids. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met were born there. But once IQ boosting genes are known they can be selected for by sequencing embryos, I.e. pick the smartest 2 embryos from a candidate pool of 100. An average couple with average variance could still produce 130 IQ kids.
- narag 4y ago
  I won't be the one to disagree on the effectivity of that approach, but not sure what would be the goal. To ellaborate: aren't there unintended consequences of very high intelligence?
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I would prefer to live in a society with more intelligent people.
    - narag 4y ago
      That reminded me of Groucho: "I drink to make other people interesting" :)
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  IQ is much more a measure of prosperity/conformity than anything else, past 90-100.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    This isn't really true. The heritability of IQ is pretty high. We know this from twin studies. Beyond this, adopted siblings, have a very low correlation coefficient of IQ by adulthood, but genetic siblings have a very high one.
mlyle 4y ago
I'll go and play along with my own definitions, even though I think the question is hard to answer because we may not agree what it means at all. Improving the development and deployment of existing human intelligence is the strongest logical pathway for expanding human intelligence. 1. Most humans don't develop to anywhere near their full potential. 2. It's unclear whether even the "best" humans are anywhere near actual limitations. 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential that could be better accomplished in other ways. Things like efforts to expand AI potentially chip away at 3.
- kshacker 4y ago
  > 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential Imagine all humans working at their full potential. Would we have fewer people because we do not need that much potential? Would this have caused world wars decades, centuries, or millennia earlier? What will be the cost of making all humans work at their full potential? Maybe a hard problem to solve.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - WJW 4y ago
    I kinda depends if they can agree on what needs to be done I suppose, just like in the real world. But TBH it sounds like it would quickly devolve into NIH, a bit like a team with too many seniors.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Imagine monarchs and elites in the 1200s picturing what would happen if the commoners were educated and able to pursue intellectual pursuits en masse. They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are scattershot and disorganized. But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative expression, and wealth, too. Imagine taking another small step in the direction towards developing and exploiting human talent and allowing for self-actualization.
narag 4y ago
The main obstacle to a happy life for most of Humanity is not lack of intelligence but irrational or selfish impulses. That would be my D. Make a more liveable world and no, we won't get there with more emotions/drama. More like live and let live. B won't expand human intelligence. C is paved with unintended consequences. Wait until it's not playing. So, IMHO, mostly A.
kbelder 4y ago
I think in the medium term, probably genetics, because that's partly a trial-and-error approach. I feel like brain-computer interfaces, and other technology that relies on actually _understanding_ details of how the brain works, are quite a ways off. But... in the short term, I think we could still make massive gains purely by improving education and child-rearing. If our schools and families actually raised and educated kids _properly_ (whatever 'properly' is), we'd see huge improvements in average IQ. Real improvements that may be culturally infeasible, and also could be very damaging if they are done wrong.
- pjscott 4y ago
  How? There's a long history of failure at raising people's IQs by environmental changes, and it doesn't seem to be for lack of trying.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    You can however lower IQ with environmental changes very effectively. Getting rid of parasites improves educational outcomes of children. Possibly their IQ as well. Who knows how much smarter would we be if flus, colds and other duseases didn't ravage bodies of our children.
  - 8note 4y ago
    My understanding is that removing lead from a variety of infrastructure has done wonders for people's intelligence, as has enabling better family planning. Which failures are you talking about?
    - pjscott 4y ago
      I consider those to be in the category of not lowering people's IQ. Making someone dumber is fairly easy: just drop them on their heads as a child, malnourish them, and expose them to lead and lots of parasites. And make sure they don't get enough iodine. But in rich countries we've already fixed those things, and there doesn't seem to be much else we can do.
- 4y ago
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Paedor 4y ago
I'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are from expanding intelligence with them. In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't even know what they do. If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double production of some cell type without hurting the child *too* much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without some very clumsy side effects. Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said, there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making people healthier.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Heritability of intelligence is high, and there's a few genes already existing in the human population that are well correlated with intelligence. You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year. Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost. Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.
hedgedoops2 4y ago
Education Basic Income and Basic Capital (so you can use education)
bee_rider 4y ago
I would say probably A. Computers complement humans well, they are good at the things we suck at, and bad at the things we're good at. Lots of progress in computers nowadays is made by hanging problem-specific accelerators off the side of conventional CPUs, so either we can be "creativity accelerators" hanging off the computers, or they can be "computational accelerators" hanging off us. It should also improve human-to-human communication speed. The whole trick of humans is that we can put our heads together and work as a super-brain. As a side-effect, the normal-humans have distill their work-product into 'ideas' that fit into the heads of other normal humans. It seems unlikely that we'll ever genetically engineer the whole human race, so continuing to produce normal-human-compatible ideas seems like a big win. If we have genetically engineered super-humans going around, they might have some ideas that are just too big to fit in our normal brains. Breaking compatibility like that seems risky, don't want people out there whose word we just fundamentally have to take on some things.
eternityforest 4y ago
Something else. All the other ones will happen to the best of our ability, but only for specific groups, and people(Or at least people like me) could wond up seeing them as almost cults, for a long while until it is totally proven safe and beneficial. The rest of us, at least for now without major cultural change, will just do more and more of our "thinking" outside our heads. Unless you can prove, via decades long studies, that your enhancements are totally safe and side effect free, with not even some headaches or 1 in 10000 complications, I'll just... use google. Even if you did have the studies I'd still want to personally meet enhanced people and see for myself if it altered their personality or caused some random aches and pains, or had some other regrettable thing they didn't bother to do a study for. Even after all that, there could still be social discrimination. If cyborgs were disliked my most people, I'll probably leave it to the people who are passionate about enhanced intelligence. Sure, maybe I could get a better job. Maybe I would even be able to understand 3D space well enough to do things like driving and not occasionally walking directly into door jambs. But by the time you have the enhancements cars will be self driving and computers will be able to do even more of the math I'd want to do. I don't think I have any close friends who want a Neuralink. CAD programs are essentially already a primitive form of neural prosthesis. We can work with shapes we couldn't work with mentally, and workflows outside of the traditional "Imagine, understand, write it down" are possible. Even if ALL the problems are solved, it probably will only be useful to people working in specific cutting edge sectors, and for committed philosophers(Professional or amateur) who belong to a school that is not against enhancements in the first place.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Abolishment of artificial scarcity moats to culture and technology, i.e. patents and copyright. Essentially, allowing access to a greater corpus of training data as a human right.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
I think baby steps: just do an IQ test with and without access to Google or Alexa, see where we are now with brain augmentation. There's a paper in that.

mlyle 4y ago

The question is ill-posed. What exactly is "human intelligence"? Are you asking me for a normative judgment (e.g. which one is morally correct?) or some kind of positive one (e.g. which one will improve outcome measure X most?) Why are you assuming that it's just one? These choices don't seem mutually exclusive.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like ML Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, I asked about what you thought would be the logical progression (under the assumption that humanity would like to continue to evolve and become more prosperous and becoming more intelligent or building more intelligent tools seems and obvious way to help enable that) Could be more than one, was just trying to give some large buckets, that's why I added D and asked for people to add their thoughts.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like ML Yah, but what is that? Are you talking about an IQ score? Ability to do the tasks that ML is not currently good at isn't a great measure (a few years ago, Go or creating high quality paintings would have qualified). E.g. one example of "D" is "rigorously studying and improving human education". But there's infinite clarification on what the problem you're trying to solve before we agree what improvement is: * Mean, median, or peak outcomes? * Performance on a given curriculum, or on a given abstract class of problems? Does creativity count? Is an education system that improves various kinds of quantitative metrics by 20% but results in a 5% less creative and flexible population a "win" or not? Pretty much all the same arguments apply no matter which approach you consider. > Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, Well, normative considerations are important. If experimenting with brain-computer interfaces for quick advancement harms humans, is it a "good path"? How do we compare these paths? Quickness, magnitude of results, "best" resulting society, least harms, some kind of cost measure?
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    Why should this discussion play out again and again in this exact form is beyond me. It's always the same troupe of beaten up arguments trying to pass while being expressed in academia-flavored rhetorics, is it the canon critical thinking essay tone they teach in the US? Insofar as the grandparent post contained some useful inquiry this should amount to uncharitable derail. So often this blows up when anything related to IQ is brought up, a profound generational trauma of american intellectualism gets a small scene to replay its discourse in suffocating detail. Maybe this is as close to the root cause as we can publicly get? Our insane tendency to avoid productive discussion and stifle true creative activity, all in favor of hollow wordplay (quasi-statistical if the situation requires, not less hollow). Our education - a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it (going against all solid evidence to the contrary, because the doctrine of never having enough education has to be preached). There is a word for this, and it is a neologism: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
    - mlyle 4y ago
      I don't like the way you are talking to me, and I especially don't like that you may not have read carefully enough to understand that parts may be agreeing with you. > a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it Drilling tons of math in rigorous ways for excessive amounts of time clearly improves various kinds of outcome measures. It also tends to cause other harms. If we want to improve intelligence, first we need to agree what intelligence is. Then we can talk about what measures are appropriate or ethical to use to try and improve it. Even if we just take a somewhat stupid measure, and say "all we care about is a hybrid of IQ and SAT-I scores at age 16"-- there's still the question of whether we care more about moving the top performance upwards or the entire distribution. If we don't agree what intelligence is, we can't answer questions like this. If we use a traditional measure like IQ as a measure of G factor-- I don't think brain-computer interfaces are going to swing things much and they may even make it worse. (But they could also allow explosions in human productivity or quality of life that are not measured on that scale). e.g. Smartphones have not made us smarter, but they may sometimes allow us to do smarter and better things.
- NhanH 4y ago
  Just to expand on the part of “ill defined question”. “Human intelligence” might not be a scale that goes up and down, so it’s a bit hard to say for sure. There is probably at least a tradeoff of flexibility vs specialization. There is also physical constraint where intelligence might be limited due to the whole brain/ machine becoming a distributed system (and you can’t have proper single point consciousness, for example). Though we don’t even know if consciousness is related to intelligence.

causi 4y ago

C is the most practical in the short term, because we don't have to understand the brain all that well to find out how to tell an embryo to make it bigger and denser. It will involve a lot of failures.

colechristensen 4y ago

If you didn't suffer from the presence of a moral code, gene editing babies for intelligence is something you could do today, or if not, with a month or two of preparations and waiting for suppliers. I would bet that it is possible to expand actual consciousness into connected hardware (silicon or engineered nervous tissue), and have that hardware expand a metric you would call intelligence. The most reasonable thing in a third direction would be improving brain development through specific training in childhood and training as an adult. A lot of intelligence comes down to how the brain organizes itself in response to inputs, and a scientific discipline to optimize this could make a lot of progress. Not that work isn't being done along these lines but I think there is a lot of room to grow here.

nonameiguess 4y ago

If you eliminate the "G" in AGI to include any mechanical, electrical, or otherwise automated non-human computational processes we can use to augment our own brain's limitations, i.e. calculators, slide rulers, all the way up to Wikipedia, then AI is clearly the answer so far. Even just books and language, augmenting human intelligence by parallelizing thinking across many humans and not losing knowledge upon death, are huge wins. But for the far future, all of the above seems like a good answer. At least one "something else" is the possibility of nutritional, electrical, or biochemical interventions that can increase brain function without needing to change our genes. Caffeine and beta blockers seem like the best things we've got so far, along with not being in a state of persistent starvation, but there are presumably ways we can do better.

cjbgkagh 4y ago

C) you don’t even have to know which genes boost intelligence to know that kids from smart parents are more likely to be intelligent. Akademgorodok was a concentration of very smart Russian scientists and turned into an (accidental?) eugenics program producing a new generation of smart kids. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met were born there. But once IQ boosting genes are known they can be selected for by sequencing embryos, I.e. pick the smartest 2 embryos from a candidate pool of 100. An average couple with average variance could still produce 130 IQ kids.

narag 4y ago
I won't be the one to disagree on the effectivity of that approach, but not sure what would be the goal. To ellaborate: aren't there unintended consequences of very high intelligence?
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I would prefer to live in a society with more intelligent people.
  - narag 4y ago
    That reminded me of Groucho: "I drink to make other people interesting" :)
tsimionescu 4y ago
IQ is much more a measure of prosperity/conformity than anything else, past 90-100.
- mlyle 4y ago
  This isn't really true. The heritability of IQ is pretty high. We know this from twin studies. Beyond this, adopted siblings, have a very low correlation coefficient of IQ by adulthood, but genetic siblings have a very high one.

mlyle 4y ago

I'll go and play along with my own definitions, even though I think the question is hard to answer because we may not agree what it means at all. Improving the development and deployment of existing human intelligence is the strongest logical pathway for expanding human intelligence. 1. Most humans don't develop to anywhere near their full potential. 2. It's unclear whether even the "best" humans are anywhere near actual limitations. 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential that could be better accomplished in other ways. Things like efforts to expand AI potentially chip away at 3.

kshacker 4y ago
> 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential Imagine all humans working at their full potential. Would we have fewer people because we do not need that much potential? Would this have caused world wars decades, centuries, or millennia earlier? What will be the cost of making all humans work at their full potential? Maybe a hard problem to solve.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- WJW 4y ago
  I kinda depends if they can agree on what needs to be done I suppose, just like in the real world. But TBH it sounds like it would quickly devolve into NIH, a bit like a team with too many seniors.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Imagine monarchs and elites in the 1200s picturing what would happen if the commoners were educated and able to pursue intellectual pursuits en masse. They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are scattershot and disorganized. But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative expression, and wealth, too. Imagine taking another small step in the direction towards developing and exploiting human talent and allowing for self-actualization.

narag 4y ago

The main obstacle to a happy life for most of Humanity is not lack of intelligence but irrational or selfish impulses. That would be my D. Make a more liveable world and no, we won't get there with more emotions/drama. More like live and let live. B won't expand human intelligence. C is paved with unintended consequences. Wait until it's not playing. So, IMHO, mostly A.

kbelder 4y ago

I think in the medium term, probably genetics, because that's partly a trial-and-error approach. I feel like brain-computer interfaces, and other technology that relies on actually _understanding_ details of how the brain works, are quite a ways off. But... in the short term, I think we could still make massive gains purely by improving education and child-rearing. If our schools and families actually raised and educated kids _properly_ (whatever 'properly' is), we'd see huge improvements in average IQ. Real improvements that may be culturally infeasible, and also could be very damaging if they are done wrong.

pjscott 4y ago
How? There's a long history of failure at raising people's IQs by environmental changes, and it doesn't seem to be for lack of trying.
- scotty79 4y ago
  You can however lower IQ with environmental changes very effectively. Getting rid of parasites improves educational outcomes of children. Possibly their IQ as well. Who knows how much smarter would we be if flus, colds and other duseases didn't ravage bodies of our children.
- 8note 4y ago
  My understanding is that removing lead from a variety of infrastructure has done wonders for people's intelligence, as has enabling better family planning. Which failures are you talking about?
  - pjscott 4y ago
    I consider those to be in the category of not lowering people's IQ. Making someone dumber is fairly easy: just drop them on their heads as a child, malnourish them, and expose them to lead and lots of parasites. And make sure they don't get enough iodine. But in rich countries we've already fixed those things, and there doesn't seem to be much else we can do.
4y ago

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Paedor 4y ago

I'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are from expanding intelligence with them. In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't even know what they do. If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double production of some cell type without hurting the child *too* much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without some very clumsy side effects. Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said, there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making people healthier.

mlyle 4y ago
Heritability of intelligence is high, and there's a few genes already existing in the human population that are well correlated with intelligence. You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year. Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost. Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.

hedgedoops2 4y ago

Education Basic Income and Basic Capital (so you can use education)

bee_rider 4y ago

I would say probably A. Computers complement humans well, they are good at the things we suck at, and bad at the things we're good at. Lots of progress in computers nowadays is made by hanging problem-specific accelerators off the side of conventional CPUs, so either we can be "creativity accelerators" hanging off the computers, or they can be "computational accelerators" hanging off us. It should also improve human-to-human communication speed. The whole trick of humans is that we can put our heads together and work as a super-brain. As a side-effect, the normal-humans have distill their work-product into 'ideas' that fit into the heads of other normal humans. It seems unlikely that we'll ever genetically engineer the whole human race, so continuing to produce normal-human-compatible ideas seems like a big win. If we have genetically engineered super-humans going around, they might have some ideas that are just too big to fit in our normal brains. Breaking compatibility like that seems risky, don't want people out there whose word we just fundamentally have to take on some things.

eternityforest 4y ago

Something else. All the other ones will happen to the best of our ability, but only for specific groups, and people(Or at least people like me) could wond up seeing them as almost cults, for a long while until it is totally proven safe and beneficial. The rest of us, at least for now without major cultural change, will just do more and more of our "thinking" outside our heads. Unless you can prove, via decades long studies, that your enhancements are totally safe and side effect free, with not even some headaches or 1 in 10000 complications, I'll just... use google. Even if you did have the studies I'd still want to personally meet enhanced people and see for myself if it altered their personality or caused some random aches and pains, or had some other regrettable thing they didn't bother to do a study for. Even after all that, there could still be social discrimination. If cyborgs were disliked my most people, I'll probably leave it to the people who are passionate about enhanced intelligence. Sure, maybe I could get a better job. Maybe I would even be able to understand 3D space well enough to do things like driving and not occasionally walking directly into door jambs. But by the time you have the enhancements cars will be self driving and computers will be able to do even more of the math I'd want to do. I don't think I have any close friends who want a Neuralink. CAD programs are essentially already a primitive form of neural prosthesis. We can work with shapes we couldn't work with mentally, and workflows outside of the traditional "Imagine, understand, write it down" are possible. Even if ALL the problems are solved, it probably will only be useful to people working in specific cutting edge sectors, and for committed philosophers(Professional or amateur) who belong to a school that is not against enhancements in the first place.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago

Abolishment of artificial scarcity moats to culture and technology, i.e. patents and copyright. Essentially, allowing access to a greater corpus of training data as a human right.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

I think baby steps: just do an IQ test with and without access to Google or Alexa, see where we are now with brain augmentation. There's a paper in that.