Well, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what scenario I should be imagining here.
Scenario 1: if genetic interventions became popular enough that the entire world were getting 10 IQ points smarter each year (EDIT: sorry, I meant “generation”), as you say, then it seems obvious to me that you’d be unable to take it back. Surely the first generation of superbabies would want future generations to be like them. If their parents say “actually, y’all were a mistake, let our grandchildren mean-regress and be normal please,” they’d simply refuse.
Scenario 2: more realistically IMO, we start with a generation of a few thousand superbabies, who are the children of rationalist-type people who really care about intelligence. Maybe these people grow up very smart but very weird, and they are unable to shape society to their weird preferences because there aren’t that many of them.
But wait, many people view these genetic interventions as our best hope to save the world… Do we expect that the superbabies are going to be smart enough to make the critical difference in solving AI alignment, but we don’t expect they’ll gain enough influence to significantly affect society’s future values? Seems unlikely to me.
For better or for worse, the second scenario is basically already playing out—you have people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who got their power by being very smart, who now get to shape the world in their own weird ways. Powerful people are already optimized for being intelligent via selection effects; genetic optimization would just be another layer on top of that.
Well, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what scenario I should be imagining here.
Scenario 1: if genetic interventions became popular enough that the entire world were getting 10 IQ points smarter each year (EDIT: sorry, I meant “generation”), as you say, then it seems obvious to me that you’d be unable to take it back. Surely the first generation of superbabies would want future generations to be like them. If their parents say “actually, y’all were a mistake, let our grandchildren mean-regress and be normal please,” they’d simply refuse.
Scenario 2: more realistically IMO, we start with a generation of a few thousand superbabies, who are the children of rationalist-type people who really care about intelligence. Maybe these people grow up very smart but very weird, and they are unable to shape society to their weird preferences because there aren’t that many of them.
But wait, many people view these genetic interventions as our best hope to save the world… Do we expect that the superbabies are going to be smart enough to make the critical difference in solving AI alignment, but we don’t expect they’ll gain enough influence to significantly affect society’s future values? Seems unlikely to me.
For better or for worse, the second scenario is basically already playing out—you have people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who got their power by being very smart, who now get to shape the world in their own weird ways. Powerful people are already optimized for being intelligent via selection effects; genetic optimization would just be another layer on top of that.