My guess is that peak intelligence is a lot more important than sheer numbers of geniuses for solving alignment. At the end of the day someone actually has to understand how to steer the outcome of ASI, which seems really hard and no one knows how to verify solutions. I think that really hard (and hard to verify) problem solving scales poorly with having more people thinking about it.
Sheer numbers of geniuses would be one effect of raising the average, but I’m guessing the “massive benefits” you’re referring to are things like coordination ability and quality of governance? I think those mainly help with alignment via buying time, but if we’re already conditioning on enhanced people having time to grow up I’m less worried about time, and also think that sufficiently widespread adoption to reap those benefits would take substantially longer (decades?).
My guess is that peak intelligence is a lot more important than sheer numbers of geniuses for solving alignment. At the end of the day someone actually has to understand how to steer the outcome of ASI, which seems really hard and no one knows how to verify solutions. I think that really hard (and hard to verify) problem solving scales poorly with having more people thinking about it.
Sheer numbers of geniuses would be one effect of raising the average, but I’m guessing the “massive benefits” you’re referring to are things like coordination ability and quality of governance? I think those mainly help with alignment via buying time, but if we’re already conditioning on enhanced people having time to grow up I’m less worried about time, and also think that sufficiently widespread adoption to reap those benefits would take substantially longer (decades?).