We could probably create humans vastly smarter than have ever previously existed with full genome synthesis, who could have a huge impact at a much younger age. But otherwise I agree.
This is true, but the farther out into the tails of the distribution we get the more likely we are to see negative effects that from traits that aren’t part of the index we’re selecting on. For example, I would be pretty surprised if we could increase IQ by 10 standard deviations in one generation without some kind of serious deleterious effects.
Alignment-problem-aware people could be early adopters of embryo-selection-for-G. There are lots of smart alignment-problem-aware people who read this forum and may be open to this idea, so it’s not necessarily circular.
Yeah, this is one of my hopes. I will probably write something about this in the future.
I don’t think large scale awareness is necessary (see my above point). Even if you could do it, pushing for large scale awareness could backfire by drawing the wrong sort of attention (e.g. by resulting in public outrage about selection-for-G so politicians move to ban it). Though I admittedly don’t place much confidence in my current ability to gauge the likelihood of this sort of thing. More awareness of the alignment problem is probably good.
I mostly think the value would be in more actual understanding of alignment difficulties among people working on AI capabilities.
This is true, but the farther out into the tails of the distribution we get the more likely we are to see negative effects that from traits that aren’t part of the index we’re selecting on.
True, but we wouldn’t need to strictly select for G by association with IQ via GWASes. I suspect G variation is largely driven by mutation load, in which case simply replacing each rare variant with one of its more common counterparts should give you a huge boost while essentially ruling out negative pleiotropy. To hedge your bets you’d probably want to do a combined approach.
I guess there’s some risk that rare variants are involved in people who, e.g., tend to take x-risk very seriously, but I doubt this. I suspect that, to whatever extent this is heritable, it’s controlled by polygenic variation over relatively common variants at many loci. So if you started out with the genomes of people who care lots about x-risk and then threw out all the rare variants, I predict you’d end up with hugely G boosted people who are predisposed to care about x-risk.
As you pointed out, this is moot if genome synthesis is out of reach.
I mostly think the value would be in more actual understanding of alignment difficulties among people working on AI capabilities.
This is true, but the farther out into the tails of the distribution we get the more likely we are to see negative effects that from traits that aren’t part of the index we’re selecting on. For example, I would be pretty surprised if we could increase IQ by 10 standard deviations in one generation without some kind of serious deleterious effects.
I have to admit, I haven’t actually done the math here, but Gwern seems to think it would roughly double the effect.
Yeah, this is one of my hopes. I will probably write something about this in the future.
I mostly think the value would be in more actual understanding of alignment difficulties among people working on AI capabilities.
Thanks for the response.
True, but we wouldn’t need to strictly select for G by association with IQ via GWASes. I suspect G variation is largely driven by mutation load, in which case simply replacing each rare variant with one of its more common counterparts should give you a huge boost while essentially ruling out negative pleiotropy. To hedge your bets you’d probably want to do a combined approach.
I guess there’s some risk that rare variants are involved in people who, e.g., tend to take x-risk very seriously, but I doubt this. I suspect that, to whatever extent this is heritable, it’s controlled by polygenic variation over relatively common variants at many loci. So if you started out with the genomes of people who care lots about x-risk and then threw out all the rare variants, I predict you’d end up with hugely G boosted people who are predisposed to care about x-risk.
As you pointed out, this is moot if genome synthesis is out of reach.
Seems sensible.