The improvements in the mental and physical well-being of the poorest of us if this huge sum of money was instead used to give them healthcare, safety from preventable, transmissible diseases (like malaria nets), clean water, healthy food, crucial supplements, reproductive rights, and most of all education, vastly, vastly outweighs raises the IQs of rich children by this little.
“Rich people” already give the lions share to anti malaria charities, just as virtually all of Earth’s economic surplus (for now, pre-AGI) comes from fairly-high-IQ people doing functionally prosocial things. The question is not “is standard EA behavior better than good embryo selection”—effective altruism exists because there are enough altruistic intelligent people around to be EAs—but how good existing methods are, and what runway we have to use them.
I think this is probably true at the moment given the current efficacy and the prices of IVF.
The only reason I hesitate is because I think the tendencies and aptitudes of people at the top have a gigantic impact on the rest of society and that improving those tendencies would have a very large impact on the world (especially if parents of children likely to end up in positions of power select for traits like kindness and pro-social tendencies).
But if you ignore that for a moment, then you’re of course correct that embryo selection can come nowhere close to the efficacy of distributing bed nets or supplementing iodine-deficient populations.
However, it’s going to take some time to bring down the price of embryo selection and future technologies for genetic improvement, so I think it’s probably good to start on that now.
Granted, this is all kind of ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room which is AI. For embryo selection to really matter, there needs to be time for these children to grow up. If we make ASI in the next 20 years, there’s probably not much point. I’m still hopeful that we can get a pause in place on AI development. But without one this whole endeavor has pretty low odds of achieving anything IMO.
The improvements in the mental and physical well-being of the poorest of us if this huge sum of money was instead used to give them healthcare, safety from preventable, transmissible diseases (like malaria nets), clean water, healthy food, crucial supplements, reproductive rights, and most of all education, vastly, vastly outweighs raises the IQs of rich children by this little.
“Rich people” already give the lions share to anti malaria charities, just as virtually all of Earth’s economic surplus (for now, pre-AGI) comes from fairly-high-IQ people doing functionally prosocial things. The question is not “is standard EA behavior better than good embryo selection”—effective altruism exists because there are enough altruistic intelligent people around to be EAs—but how good existing methods are, and what runway we have to use them.
I think this is probably true at the moment given the current efficacy and the prices of IVF.
The only reason I hesitate is because I think the tendencies and aptitudes of people at the top have a gigantic impact on the rest of society and that improving those tendencies would have a very large impact on the world (especially if parents of children likely to end up in positions of power select for traits like kindness and pro-social tendencies).
But if you ignore that for a moment, then you’re of course correct that embryo selection can come nowhere close to the efficacy of distributing bed nets or supplementing iodine-deficient populations.
However, it’s going to take some time to bring down the price of embryo selection and future technologies for genetic improvement, so I think it’s probably good to start on that now.
Granted, this is all kind of ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room which is AI. For embryo selection to really matter, there needs to be time for these children to grow up. If we make ASI in the next 20 years, there’s probably not much point. I’m still hopeful that we can get a pause in place on AI development. But without one this whole endeavor has pretty low odds of achieving anything IMO.