Emphasis on probably—intelligence is not a simple matter, and it is unclear that our genome, even if we clearly identify all relevant factors, would be “open ended”—that is to say, there may be a difference between “making you as smart as you can be” and “making you smarter than any human ever”. As a poor analogy, we will certainly soon be able to make humans taller, but there may be limits to how tall a human can be without important system failures; we have already had very tall people, and even if we do want to breed for tall, we might choose to top out at 7′0″ for health reasons. Likewise, when you think of smart people, it may be that you are thinking of people with skills maximized for specific functions at the cost of other functions, and a balanced intelligence might top out at some level… at least until we get past mapping what we have and into the much harder task of designing new types of genomes.
Emphasis on probably—intelligence is not a simple matter, and it is unclear that our genome, even if we clearly identify all relevant factors, would be “open ended”—that is to say, there may be a difference between “making you as smart as you can be” and “making you smarter than any human ever”. As a poor analogy, we will certainly soon be able to make humans taller, but there may be limits to how tall a human can be without important system failures; we have already had very tall people, and even if we do want to breed for tall, we might choose to top out at 7′0″ for health reasons. Likewise, when you think of smart people, it may be that you are thinking of people with skills maximized for specific functions at the cost of other functions, and a balanced intelligence might top out at some level… at least until we get past mapping what we have and into the much harder task of designing new types of genomes.