I think somatic gene therapy, while technically possible in principal, is extremely unpromising for intelligence augmentation. Creating a super-genius is almost trivial with germ-line engineering. Provided we know enough causal variants, one needs to only make a low-hundreds number of edits to one cell to make someone smarter than any human that has ever lived. With somatic gene therapy you would almost certainly have to alter billions of cells to get anywhere.
Networking humans is interesting but we have nowhere close to the bandwidth needed now. As a rough guess lets suppose we need similar bandwidth to the corpus callosum, neuralink is ~5 OOMs off.
I suspect human intelligence enhancement will not progress much in the next 5 years, not counting human/ML hybrid systems.
Networking humans is interesting but we have nowhere close to the bandwidth needed now.
GPT-3 manages with mere 12K dimensions on the residual stream (for 175B parameters), which carries all information between the layers. So tens of thousands of connections might turn out to be sufficient.
If so, one might imagine getting there via high-end non-invasive BCI (as long as one uses closed loops, so that the electronic side might specifically aim at changing the signal it reads from the biological entity, and that’s how the electronic side would know that its signals are effective).
Of course, the risks of doing that are quite formidable even with non-invasive BCI, and various precautions should be taken. (But at least there is no surgery, plus one would have much quicker and less expensive iterations and a much less regulated environment, since nothing which is formally considered a medical procedure seems to be involved.)
One might want to try something like this in parallel with Neuralink-style efforts...
Creating a super-genius is almost trivial with germ-line engineering.
Eh, I mean, everything I hear from geneticists on any topic suggests that DNA interactions are crazy complex because the whole thing wasn’t designed to be a sensible system of switches you just turn on and off (wasn’t designed at all, to be fair). I’d really really be suspicious of this sort of confidence.
Also honestly I think this actually incurs into problems analogue to AI. We talk about AI alignment and sure, humans shouldn’t have such a large potential goal space, but:
you just messed with a bunch of brain stuff so who knows what the fuck have you done, maybe in making the brain more rational you’ve also just accidentally removed all empathy or baseline care for other humans
regardless of 1 imagine now having these super-genius mutant kids being raised in I assume some specific nurturing environment to help them flourish… dunno, I don’t think that results in some particularly salt-of-the-earth people with empathetic goals. Being raised as a demigod savior of humanity by people who all invariably feel much stupider than you seems like exactly what you’d do to create some kind of supervillain.
And that’s of course suspending ethical judgement on the whole thing or the way in which germline editing can go wrong (and thus scores of children actually born with weird genetic defects or mental disabilities).
Creating a super-genius is almost trivial with germ-line engineering.
Not really true—known SNP mutations associated with high intelligence have relatively low effect in total. The best way to make a really smart baby with current techniques is with donor egg and sperm, or cloning.
It is also possible that variance in intelligence among humans is due to something analogous to starting values in neural networks—lucky/crafted values can result in higher final performance, but getting those values into an already established network just adds noise. You can’t really change macrostructures in the brain with gene therapy in adults, after all.
I think somatic gene therapy, while technically possible in principal, is extremely unpromising for intelligence augmentation. Creating a super-genius is almost trivial with germ-line engineering. Provided we know enough causal variants, one needs to only make a low-hundreds number of edits to one cell to make someone smarter than any human that has ever lived. With somatic gene therapy you would almost certainly have to alter billions of cells to get anywhere.
Networking humans is interesting but we have nowhere close to the bandwidth needed now. As a rough guess lets suppose we need similar bandwidth to the corpus callosum, neuralink is ~5 OOMs off.
I suspect human intelligence enhancement will not progress much in the next 5 years, not counting human/ML hybrid systems.
GPT-3 manages with mere 12K dimensions on the residual stream (for 175B parameters), which carries all information between the layers. So tens of thousands of connections might turn out to be sufficient.
If so, one might imagine getting there via high-end non-invasive BCI (as long as one uses closed loops, so that the electronic side might specifically aim at changing the signal it reads from the biological entity, and that’s how the electronic side would know that its signals are effective).
Of course, the risks of doing that are quite formidable even with non-invasive BCI, and various precautions should be taken. (But at least there is no surgery, plus one would have much quicker and less expensive iterations and a much less regulated environment, since nothing which is formally considered a medical procedure seems to be involved.)
One might want to try something like this in parallel with Neuralink-style efforts...
Eh, I mean, everything I hear from geneticists on any topic suggests that DNA interactions are crazy complex because the whole thing wasn’t designed to be a sensible system of switches you just turn on and off (wasn’t designed at all, to be fair). I’d really really be suspicious of this sort of confidence.
Also honestly I think this actually incurs into problems analogue to AI. We talk about AI alignment and sure, humans shouldn’t have such a large potential goal space, but:
you just messed with a bunch of brain stuff so who knows what the fuck have you done, maybe in making the brain more rational you’ve also just accidentally removed all empathy or baseline care for other humans
regardless of 1 imagine now having these super-genius mutant kids being raised in I assume some specific nurturing environment to help them flourish… dunno, I don’t think that results in some particularly salt-of-the-earth people with empathetic goals. Being raised as a demigod savior of humanity by people who all invariably feel much stupider than you seems like exactly what you’d do to create some kind of supervillain.
And that’s of course suspending ethical judgement on the whole thing or the way in which germline editing can go wrong (and thus scores of children actually born with weird genetic defects or mental disabilities).
Not really true—known SNP mutations associated with high intelligence have relatively low effect in total. The best way to make a really smart baby with current techniques is with donor egg and sperm, or cloning.
It is also possible that variance in intelligence among humans is due to something analogous to starting values in neural networks—lucky/crafted values can result in higher final performance, but getting those values into an already established network just adds noise. You can’t really change macrostructures in the brain with gene therapy in adults, after all.