That is called germline engineering I think? Anyway, I believe that is even more dangerous and unfeasible.
On a side note. I’m not treating intelligence as a mystical process but something highly vague. Intelligence is used like the term emergence, you could replace it with the word magic or simply leave it away and get the same result. If it is simply used as a shorthand for ‘problem-solving’ then what does it mean to increase intelligence? A generic solution to a large set of problems? Problems are not solved, solutions are discovered. Intelligence has a somewhat proactive aftertaste. But nothing genuine new is ever being created deliberately. We’ve to figure out how amplify that which allows intellectually productive people to make sense of large amounts of information, draw conclusions and infer new rules. But even then, there is no guarantee it will ever yield anything genuine without a lot of dumb luck. If intelligence would mean that you could simply pull a solution to a problem out of your head then intelligence would be the solution, which doesn’t change anything. No superhuman AI will ever be able to come up with anything that isn’t already hardcoded in its present state, everything else it will have to stumble upon and then alter itself to make effective use of this new discovery.
No superhuman AI will ever be able to come up with anything that isn’t already hardcoded in its present state
So you’d then assert that computers, cars, hammers, fire and steel were all ‘hardcoded’ in human’s ‘state’? It sounds like you’re saying that rather than turning us into decent problem solvers, evolution supplied us with blueprints to specific problems we’ve solved?
No, I meant that we discovered those things and did not invent them. If intelligence would have been the solution to discover them then they would have been hardcoded. Intelligence merely allowed us to comprehend certain relationships. But if we already knew how to design intelligence that can recognize and make use of a superhuman set of relationships, then we’d pretty much be that intelligent ourselves. We discover new heuristics and tools to infer relationships that no human could possible come up with on his own, but we’re not able to alter ourselves to make use of this new level internally right now.
Take graphene, they didn’t even predict that it might exist. It was sheer luck that they found it. And this luck will serve as a new stage for other lucky discoveries. Intelligence (indirectly) just made us recognize its utility. Even now we already start using evolutionary algorithms for things like antenna design that humans have a really hard time judging its usefulness, if it wasn’t for the fact that they worked better than what we could come up with using permutations of what we already know.
That is called germline engineering I think? Anyway, I believe that is even more dangerous and unfeasible.
On a side note. I’m not treating intelligence as a mystical process but something highly vague. Intelligence is used like the term emergence, you could replace it with the word magic or simply leave it away and get the same result. If it is simply used as a shorthand for ‘problem-solving’ then what does it mean to increase intelligence? A generic solution to a large set of problems? Problems are not solved, solutions are discovered. Intelligence has a somewhat proactive aftertaste. But nothing genuine new is ever being created deliberately. We’ve to figure out how amplify that which allows intellectually productive people to make sense of large amounts of information, draw conclusions and infer new rules. But even then, there is no guarantee it will ever yield anything genuine without a lot of dumb luck. If intelligence would mean that you could simply pull a solution to a problem out of your head then intelligence would be the solution, which doesn’t change anything. No superhuman AI will ever be able to come up with anything that isn’t already hardcoded in its present state, everything else it will have to stumble upon and then alter itself to make effective use of this new discovery.
So you’d then assert that computers, cars, hammers, fire and steel were all ‘hardcoded’ in human’s ‘state’? It sounds like you’re saying that rather than turning us into decent problem solvers, evolution supplied us with blueprints to specific problems we’ve solved?
No, I meant that we discovered those things and did not invent them. If intelligence would have been the solution to discover them then they would have been hardcoded. Intelligence merely allowed us to comprehend certain relationships. But if we already knew how to design intelligence that can recognize and make use of a superhuman set of relationships, then we’d pretty much be that intelligent ourselves. We discover new heuristics and tools to infer relationships that no human could possible come up with on his own, but we’re not able to alter ourselves to make use of this new level internally right now.
Take graphene, they didn’t even predict that it might exist. It was sheer luck that they found it. And this luck will serve as a new stage for other lucky discoveries. Intelligence (indirectly) just made us recognize its utility. Even now we already start using evolutionary algorithms for things like antenna design that humans have a really hard time judging its usefulness, if it wasn’t for the fact that they worked better than what we could come up with using permutations of what we already know.