Your whole analysis seems fundamentally confused: I’m not talking about modifying already living people’s DNA via gene therapy or the like. I’m talking about engineering sperm/eggs. Engineering a bunch of Eliezer Yudkowsky-like kids seems like a damn good idea, and eminently possible.
What you wrote is three paragraphs of mere assertion. What’s going on here? Why are people treating intelligence as some mystical process that is beyond the realm of science? What scientific roadblocks don’t I know about? It seems that for a long time the limits were technical, and that we’re starting to gain traction on dealing with those problems. We don’t have to know what intelligence is to find meaningful and usefully manipulable genes that correlate with it. There’s a whole lot about intelligence we don’t have to understand.
I don’t think intelligence is any more ‘mysterious’ than our ignorance. But you have to understand before you tinker.
One of the stranger issues with animal breeding is that selecting for physiological traits tends to have behavioral consequences. All-white animals (chickens, horses, dogs) often have problems with aggression. Chickens selected to lay more eggs are also more prone to stress. Genetic engineering has predictable, consistent results in some contexts (a luminescent fish is, as far as I know, the same as a normal fish except for the glow) but unpredictable results in other contexts.
How much more so, with genes thought to code for intelligence?
Before you start manipulating genes (in humans?!) that merely correlate with intelligence, I think you need to find out a bit more about what those genes do in the brain. Otherwise, you’re more likely to produce a crazy or dead baby than a genius baby.
It definitely goes the other way too: In the Soviet Union some researchers bred foxes for several generations, selecting for tameness. Within a few generations the foxes started developing wider foreheads, wagging tails and floppy ears.
Please note that I did not intent on being derogatory or that I tried to ridicule your idea. I often forget how what I say is perceived by other people. I’m mainly writing this for myself to clear things up in my head and for further feedback. So it’s just a bunch of ideas in the form of an opposing argument. I don’t even disagree with you really. I often told myself I should rather switch to asking mode rather than devils advocate.
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.
Your whole analysis seems fundamentally confused: I’m not talking about modifying already living people’s DNA via gene therapy or the like. I’m talking about engineering sperm/eggs. Engineering a bunch of Eliezer Yudkowsky-like kids seems like a damn good idea, and eminently possible.
What you wrote is three paragraphs of mere assertion. What’s going on here? Why are people treating intelligence as some mystical process that is beyond the realm of science? What scientific roadblocks don’t I know about? It seems that for a long time the limits were technical, and that we’re starting to gain traction on dealing with those problems. We don’t have to know what intelligence is to find meaningful and usefully manipulable genes that correlate with it. There’s a whole lot about intelligence we don’t have to understand.
I don’t think intelligence is any more ‘mysterious’ than our ignorance. But you have to understand before you tinker.
One of the stranger issues with animal breeding is that selecting for physiological traits tends to have behavioral consequences. All-white animals (chickens, horses, dogs) often have problems with aggression. Chickens selected to lay more eggs are also more prone to stress. Genetic engineering has predictable, consistent results in some contexts (a luminescent fish is, as far as I know, the same as a normal fish except for the glow) but unpredictable results in other contexts.
How much more so, with genes thought to code for intelligence?
Before you start manipulating genes (in humans?!) that merely correlate with intelligence, I think you need to find out a bit more about what those genes do in the brain. Otherwise, you’re more likely to produce a crazy or dead baby than a genius baby.
It definitely goes the other way too: In the Soviet Union some researchers bred foxes for several generations, selecting for tameness. Within a few generations the foxes started developing wider foreheads, wagging tails and floppy ears.
And now they are available as extremely expensive pets.
Please note that I did not intent on being derogatory or that I tried to ridicule your idea. I often forget how what I say is perceived by other people. I’m mainly writing this for myself to clear things up in my head and for further feedback. So it’s just a bunch of ideas in the form of an opposing argument. I don’t even disagree with you really. I often told myself I should rather switch to asking mode rather than devils advocate.
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.