Even without AIs, increases in human intelligences will soon almost certainly accelerate technological progress. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that evolution just happened to stumble upon the smartest people our phenotype can support when it created individuals such as Albert Einstein and John von Neumann. The exponentially decreasing costs of gene scanning will soon allow us to find the genetic basis of genius. (The Chinese are already looking!) And it won’t be too long after finding this that someone (such as the pro-eugenics Chinese) will create people vastly smarter than have ever existed. The technological advances that they will likely give us in areas such as nanotech will (if AI doesn’t give it to us first) significantly progress the day by which Alcor will be able to revive its cryonics clients.
Uh, you skipped a step. The bottleneck is trait-selection/gene therapy more than it is knowing where the gene loci are. We know the signatures of Huntington’s and some other genetic diseases, but that hasn’t led to the ability to cure them. Right now, we can only negatively select through abortion, so that wouldn’t create the geniuses you’re looking for.
See my article “A Thousand Chinese Einsteins Every Year” for a more detailed explanation. I’ve learned a lot since writing this article (in 2007) and my latest views on the potential of eugenics are fully spelled out in my book Singularity Rising that will be released in a few weeks.
Another possible hard part: if world-shaking genius (not just being unusually smart) is the result of having the sort of mind which fits a solvable hard problem, then how would anyone know what traits to amplify and what education is needed?
Uh, you skipped a step. The bottleneck is trait-selection/gene therapy more than it is knowing where the gene loci are. We know the signatures of Huntington’s and some other genetic diseases, but that hasn’t led to the ability to cure them. Right now, we can only negatively select through abortion, so that wouldn’t create the geniuses you’re looking for.
See my article “A Thousand Chinese Einsteins Every Year” for a more detailed explanation. I’ve learned a lot since writing this article (in 2007) and my latest views on the potential of eugenics are fully spelled out in my book Singularity Rising that will be released in a few weeks.
Another possible hard part: if world-shaking genius (not just being unusually smart) is the result of having the sort of mind which fits a solvable hard problem, then how would anyone know what traits to amplify and what education is needed?
Don’t underestimate the power of g:
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2002ghighlygeneral.pdf
Linda Gottfredson’s papers in general reward study:
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/