On the one hand, we have an aligned starting point (baseline humans).
Humans are not aligned. Joseph Stalin was not aligned with the utility of the citizenry of Russia. Humans of roughly equal capabilities can easily be allied with (in general, all you need to do is pay them a decent salary, and have a capable law enforcement system as a backup). This is not the same thing as an aligned AI, which is completely selfless, and cares only about what you want — that is the only thing that’s still safe when much smarter than you. In a human, that would be significantly past the criteria for sainthood. Once a human or group of humans are enhanced to become dramatically more capable and thus more powerful than the rest of human culture (including its law enforcement), power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The Transhumanist Metastrategy consists of building known-to-be-unaligned superintelligences that have full human rights, so you can’t even try boxing them. You just created a superintelligent living species sharing our niche and motivated by standard Evolutionary Psychology drives. As long as none of the transhumans are sociopaths, you might manage for a decade or two while the transhumans and humans are still connected by bonds of friendship and kinship, but after a generation or so, the inevitable result is Biology 101: the superior species out-competes the inferior species. Full stop, end of human race. Which is of course fine for the transhumans, until some proportion of them upgrade themselves further, and out-compete the rest. And so on, in an infinite arms race, or until they have the sense to ban making the same mistake over and over again.
I heard that Ashkenazi Jews are 1 SD up on IQ, which is about the kind of improvement we are talking about with embryo selection. I do not have the impression they are bad towards other humans. Do you think otherwise?
To be clear, I am not trying to gotcha you with antisemitism, and I totally understand if you want to avoid discussion because this is a politically charged topic.
I wouldn’t expect this issue to kick in significantly until you were roughly twice as intelligent as the average detective in law enforcement: you would need a significant effective power differential, such that you could pretty reliably commit crimes and actually get away with them (or come up with dastardly tactics that haven’t been criminalized because no one else though of them). If that statistic is accurate, then 1 SD is ~15 IQ points which isn’t going to cut it. If we had accurate crime records for a decent sample size of people with IQ 200–250 (at least 7 SD) then we could have a discussion — otherwise I’m extrapolating from effects of other much larger power differentials produced mostly by causes other then raw IQ, like handing people executive power.
Humans are not aligned. Joseph Stalin was not aligned with the utility of the citizenry of Russia. Humans of roughly equal capabilities can easily be allied with (in general, all you need to do is pay them a decent salary, and have a capable law enforcement system as a backup). This is not the same thing as an aligned AI, which is completely selfless, and cares only about what you want — that is the only thing that’s still safe when much smarter than you. In a human, that would be significantly past the criteria for sainthood. Once a human or group of humans are enhanced to become dramatically more capable and thus more powerful than the rest of human culture (including its law enforcement), power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The Transhumanist Metastrategy consists of building known-to-be-unaligned superintelligences that have full human rights, so you can’t even try boxing them. You just created a superintelligent living species sharing our niche and motivated by standard Evolutionary Psychology drives. As long as none of the transhumans are sociopaths, you might manage for a decade or two while the transhumans and humans are still connected by bonds of friendship and kinship, but after a generation or so, the inevitable result is Biology 101: the superior species out-competes the inferior species. Full stop, end of human race. Which is of course fine for the transhumans, until some proportion of them upgrade themselves further, and out-compete the rest. And so on, in an infinite arms race, or until they have the sense to ban making the same mistake over and over again.
I heard that Ashkenazi Jews are 1 SD up on IQ, which is about the kind of improvement we are talking about with embryo selection. I do not have the impression they are bad towards other humans. Do you think otherwise?
To be clear, I am not trying to gotcha you with antisemitism, and I totally understand if you want to avoid discussion because this is a politically charged topic.
I wouldn’t expect this issue to kick in significantly until you were roughly twice as intelligent as the average detective in law enforcement: you would need a significant effective power differential, such that you could pretty reliably commit crimes and actually get away with them (or come up with dastardly tactics that haven’t been criminalized because no one else though of them). If that statistic is accurate, then 1 SD is ~15 IQ points which isn’t going to cut it. If we had accurate crime records for a decent sample size of people with IQ 200–250 (at least 7 SD) then we could have a discussion — otherwise I’m extrapolating from effects of other much larger power differentials produced mostly by causes other then raw IQ, like handing people executive power.