Do you have any views on the most promising avenues for human intelligenceenhancement through biology? I’d be most interested in approaches that would give us (humanity) better odds in worlds where AI takes off in the next 1–15 years.
The most promising approach is using genetic material from smart people to make children, but there are the obvious social issues with that. In general, I suspect that human intelligence is limited partly by increased value drift leading at some point to people having fewer kids.
The 2nd-most promising approach is genetic screening of embryos and embryo selection, but currently that’s only understood well enough for smallish improvements, and if it was common enough I suspect it could lead to problems from reduced genetic diversity.
I was not impressed by the first linked post. Many relevant genes only affect early brain development. Genetic engineering of a fertilized egg cell is much easier, and significantly improving intelligence that way is still not a thing considered practical to do today. The author’s understanding of biology is poor by my standards.
I’m also not optimistic about Neuralink:
Implants for input are worse than vision and displays.
Neuron development for high-bandwidth output requires direct feedback to neurons, which for muscle control comes from proprioceptors. That feedback is in the form of complex patterns of chemicals being released, which a brain implant wouldn’t be able to do even if those patterns were fully understood, which they aren’t.
On a timescale of 1-15 years, if you want smarter people, the best you can hope for is probably better education. I think that AI training has some insights for designing education, and I suppose understanding AI architectures and operation has made me a little bit smarter.
Do you have any views on the most promising avenues for human intelligence enhancement through biology? I’d be most interested in approaches that would give us (humanity) better odds in worlds where AI takes off in the next 1–15 years.
The most promising approach is using genetic material from smart people to make children, but there are the obvious social issues with that. In general, I suspect that human intelligence is limited partly by increased value drift leading at some point to people having fewer kids.
The 2nd-most promising approach is genetic screening of embryos and embryo selection, but currently that’s only understood well enough for smallish improvements, and if it was common enough I suspect it could lead to problems from reduced genetic diversity.
I was not impressed by the first linked post. Many relevant genes only affect early brain development. Genetic engineering of a fertilized egg cell is much easier, and significantly improving intelligence that way is still not a thing considered practical to do today. The author’s understanding of biology is poor by my standards.
I’m also not optimistic about Neuralink:
Implants for input are worse than vision and displays.
Neuron development for high-bandwidth output requires direct feedback to neurons, which for muscle control comes from proprioceptors. That feedback is in the form of complex patterns of chemicals being released, which a brain implant wouldn’t be able to do even if those patterns were fully understood, which they aren’t.
On a timescale of 1-15 years, if you want smarter people, the best you can hope for is probably better education. I think that AI training has some insights for designing education, and I suppose understanding AI architectures and operation has made me a little bit smarter.