@Steven Byrnes In case I accidentally give the wrong impression that this was my original idea, Vernor Vinge had talked about it in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era as one of several possible routes to the Singularity, and Carl Shulman talked about “iterated embryo selection” in 2009 which is where I got that term from. In retrospect I think reading Vinge in my youth (college years) gave me a way too-high expectation of humanity, e.g., I thought there would be entire academic disciplines devoted to studying questions like which route to the Singularity humanity should take.
@Steven Byrnes In case I accidentally give the wrong impression that this was my original idea, Vernor Vinge had talked about it in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era as one of several possible routes to the Singularity, and Carl Shulman talked about “iterated embryo selection” in 2009 which is where I got that term from. In retrospect I think reading Vinge in my youth (college years) gave me a way too-high expectation of humanity, e.g., I thought there would be entire academic disciplines devoted to studying questions like which route to the Singularity humanity should take.