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).
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).