So I’m obviously talking my own book here but my personal view is that one of the more neglected ways to potentially reduce x-risk is to make humans more capable of handling both technical and governance challenges associated with new technology.
There are a huge number of people who implicitly believe this, but almost all effort goes into things like educational initiatives or the formation of new companies to tackle specific problems. Some of these work pretty well, but the power of such initiatives is pretty small compared to what you could feasibly achieve with tech to do genetic enhancement.
Nearly zero investment or effort being is being put into the latter, which I think is a mistake. We could potentially increase human IQ by 20-80 points, decrease mental health disorder risk, and improve overall health just using the knowledge we have today:
There ARE technical barriers to rolling this out; no one has pushed multiplex editing to the scale of hundreds of edits yet (something my company is currently working on demonstrating). And we don’t yet have a way to convert an edited cell into an egg or an embryo (though there are a half dozen companies working on that technology right now).
I think in most worlds genetically enhanced humans don’t have time to grow up before we make digital superintelligence. But in the ~10% of worlds where they do, this tech could have an absolutely massive positive impact. And given how little money it would take to get the ball rolling here (a few tens of millions to fund many of the most promising projects in the field), I think the counterfactual impact of funding here is pretty large.
So I’m obviously talking my own book here but my personal view is that one of the more neglected ways to potentially reduce x-risk is to make humans more capable of handling both technical and governance challenges associated with new technology.
There are a huge number of people who implicitly believe this, but almost all effort goes into things like educational initiatives or the formation of new companies to tackle specific problems. Some of these work pretty well, but the power of such initiatives is pretty small compared to what you could feasibly achieve with tech to do genetic enhancement.
Nearly zero investment or effort being is being put into the latter, which I think is a mistake. We could potentially increase human IQ by 20-80 points, decrease mental health disorder risk, and improve overall health just using the knowledge we have today:
There ARE technical barriers to rolling this out; no one has pushed multiplex editing to the scale of hundreds of edits yet (something my company is currently working on demonstrating). And we don’t yet have a way to convert an edited cell into an egg or an embryo (though there are a half dozen companies working on that technology right now).
I think in most worlds genetically enhanced humans don’t have time to grow up before we make digital superintelligence. But in the ~10% of worlds where they do, this tech could have an absolutely massive positive impact. And given how little money it would take to get the ball rolling here (a few tens of millions to fund many of the most promising projects in the field), I think the counterfactual impact of funding here is pretty large.
If you’d like to chat more send me an email: genesmithlesswrong@gmail.com
You can also read more of the stuff I’ve written on this topic here