High population may actually be a problem, because it allows the AI transition to occur at low average human intelligence, hampering its governance. Low fertility/population would force humans to increase average intelligence before creating our successor, perhaps a good thing!
This assumes that it’s possible to create better or worse successors, and that higher average human intelligence would lead to smarter/better politicians and policies, increasing our likelihood of building better successors.
Some worry about low fertility leading to a collapse of civilization, but embryo selection for IQ could prevent that, and even if collapse happens, natural selection would start increasing fertility and intelligence of humans again, so future smarter humans should be able to rebuild civilization and restart technological progress.
Added: Here’s an example to illustrate my model. Assume a normally distributed population with average IQ of 100 and we need a certain number of people with IQ>130 to achieve AGI. If the total population was to half, then to get the same absolute number of IQ>130 people as today, average IQ would have to increase by 4.5, and if the population was to become 1⁄10 of the original, average IQ would have to increase by 18.75.
I find the idea interesting: To achieve a certain value of “total genius”, we either need a large population with a small fraction of geniuses, or a small population with a large fraction of geniuses.
(A third option is a small population with a small fraction of geniuses… and it takes a lot of time. The geniuses read each other’s books, rather than talk to each other directly. I think it was like this in the past. Very inefficient, because the information transfer by reading books is one-sided; does not allow collaboration in real time.)
I wonder how the heritability of IQ works, versus the reversion to the mean. Despite Pol Pot’s dystopian project, the average IQ in Cambodia seems to be… average. What would happen to a country where let’s say half of the children are produced by artificial insemination, and half of the sperm comes from fathers with IQ 130 and above? If the mother is average, the child is likely to be an average between 100 and 130, so 115. On one hand, nothing exceptional; on the other hand, if the baseline is now slightly higher, then the next generation… and here comes the question how exactly the reversion to the mean works, and whether the constant injections of IQ 130 genes in the population could outrun it.
Reversion to the mean happens because the phenotype is an imperfect proxy for the genotype, so if you select a person with phenotypic IQ of 130, maybe their genotypic IQ is only 124, and therefore their offspring with an IQ 100 person would only be IQ 112 in expectation.
However, this expectation applies to both the offspring’s genotypic and phenotypic IQ, so this is the only regression to the mean you’re going to see; it’s not going to regress further down the line.
Crossposting from X:
High population may actually be a problem, because it allows the AI transition to occur at low average human intelligence, hampering its governance. Low fertility/population would force humans to increase average intelligence before creating our successor, perhaps a good thing!
This assumes that it’s possible to create better or worse successors, and that higher average human intelligence would lead to smarter/better politicians and policies, increasing our likelihood of building better successors.
Some worry about low fertility leading to a collapse of civilization, but embryo selection for IQ could prevent that, and even if collapse happens, natural selection would start increasing fertility and intelligence of humans again, so future smarter humans should be able to rebuild civilization and restart technological progress.
Added: Here’s an example to illustrate my model. Assume a normally distributed population with average IQ of 100 and we need a certain number of people with IQ>130 to achieve AGI. If the total population was to half, then to get the same absolute number of IQ>130 people as today, average IQ would have to increase by 4.5, and if the population was to become 1⁄10 of the original, average IQ would have to increase by 18.75.
I find the idea interesting: To achieve a certain value of “total genius”, we either need a large population with a small fraction of geniuses, or a small population with a large fraction of geniuses.
(A third option is a small population with a small fraction of geniuses… and it takes a lot of time. The geniuses read each other’s books, rather than talk to each other directly. I think it was like this in the past. Very inefficient, because the information transfer by reading books is one-sided; does not allow collaboration in real time.)
I wonder how the heritability of IQ works, versus the reversion to the mean. Despite Pol Pot’s dystopian project, the average IQ in Cambodia seems to be… average. What would happen to a country where let’s say half of the children are produced by artificial insemination, and half of the sperm comes from fathers with IQ 130 and above? If the mother is average, the child is likely to be an average between 100 and 130, so 115. On one hand, nothing exceptional; on the other hand, if the baseline is now slightly higher, then the next generation… and here comes the question how exactly the reversion to the mean works, and whether the constant injections of IQ 130 genes in the population could outrun it.
Reversion to the mean happens because the phenotype is an imperfect proxy for the genotype, so if you select a person with phenotypic IQ of 130, maybe their genotypic IQ is only 124, and therefore their offspring with an IQ 100 person would only be IQ 112 in expectation.
However, this expectation applies to both the offspring’s genotypic and phenotypic IQ, so this is the only regression to the mean you’re going to see; it’s not going to regress further down the line.