A new intelligence enhancing brain surgery has just been developed. In accordance with Algernon’s Law, it has a severe drawback: your brain loses its ability to process sensory input from your eyes, causing you to go blind.
How big of an intelligence increase would it take before you’d be willing to give up your eyesight?
Enough to make learning Braille, meaningfully improving existing screenreader software if I don’t care for it, and figuring out how to echolocate relatively short-term projects so that I could move on to other things instead of spending forever trying to reconstruct the anatomy of my life.
I almost said “enough to be able to route around this drawback somehow”, but no, I don’t think it’s quite that dire.
(Inspired by sci-fi story)
A new intelligence enhancing brain surgery has just been developed. In accordance with Algernon’s Law, it has a severe drawback: your brain loses its ability to process sensory input from your eyes, causing you to go blind.
How big of an intelligence increase would it take before you’d be willing to give up your eyesight?
Enough to make learning Braille, meaningfully improving existing screenreader software if I don’t care for it, and figuring out how to echolocate relatively short-term projects so that I could move on to other things instead of spending forever trying to reconstruct the anatomy of my life.
I almost said “enough to be able to route around this drawback somehow”, but no, I don’t think it’s quite that dire.