(Edited because I don’t think my original terse reply made my thoughts on this very clear)
If we’re in a (very) long timeline world, I suspect the default thing that ends up happening is that embryo selection is gradually adopted, and G slowly rises population-wide. The reason timelines are long in such a world is that AGI ended up being way harder than it currently looks, so the gradually rising G levels would indeed increase the probability that unaligned AGI is created, unless this somewhat-higher-G world also manages to get large scale coordination right (don’t hold your breath). Alignment research would directly benefit from more capable researchers, and would probably benefit from far greater public awareness than it currently receives (due to generally higher sanity and also just more time for the ideas to percolate into the mainstream), which in turn means far more researchers working on it. People in alignment-aware communities would likely be early adopters of embryo selection, which could give alignment a head start (this is one strategy we might wish to consider: the point of my post was to get us to start thinking about these sorts of strategies).
If we’re only in a medium~longish timeline world (AGI in the latter half of this century, say) then there won’t be enough time for this sort of large scale adoption: a quick G boosting intervention would be used by a small group of early-adopters long before it catches on more broadly. So, strategically, we’d want to be thinking about making sure that the “small group of early-adopters” is alignment-aware.
Good point, I didn’t address this at all in the post. Germline editing is indeed outside the current Overton window. One thing I’m curious about is whether there are any shreds of hope that we might be able to accelerate any of the relevant technical research: one thing this implies is not specifically focusing on the use case of enhancement, to avoid attracting condemnation (which would risk slowing existing research due to e.g. new regulations being levied).
For some techniques this seems harder than for others: iterated embryo selection is pretty clearly meant for enhancement (which could also mean animal enhancement, i.e. efficient livestock breeding). The Cas9 stuff has lots of potential uses, so it’s currently being heavily pursued despite norms. There’s also lots of ongoing work on the synthesis of simple genomes (e.g. for bacteria), with many companies offering synthesis services. Of course, the problems I identified as likely being on the critical path to creating modal human genomes are pretty enhancement specific (again, the only other application that comes to mind is making better livestock) which is unfortunate, given the massive (and quick!) upside of this approach if you can get it to work.