Hmm, that seems to depend on what assumptions you make. Suppose it takes N years to develop proto-AI to the point where it can find a sleep-mimicking drug, and after that it would take M more years to develop general AI, and M * 1.5 more years to develop friendly general AI. If M is much higher than how long it takes for the FAI researchers to start using the drug (which I imagine could be a few months), then the FAI researchers might be enhanced for most of the M-year period before competitors make AGI.
I think you’re assuming M is really low. My intuition is that many of these enhancements wouldn’t require much more than a well-funded team and years of work with today’s technology (but fewer years with proto-AI), and that N is much smaller than M. But this depends a lot on the details of the enhancement problems and on the current state of biotechnology and bioinformatics, and I don’t know very much. Are there people associated with MIRI and such who work on human bioenhancement?
Hmm, that seems to depend on what assumptions you make. Suppose it takes N years to develop proto-AI to the point where it can find a sleep-mimicking drug, and after that it would take M more years to develop general AI, and M * 1.5 more years to develop friendly general AI. If M is much higher than how long it takes for the FAI researchers to start using the drug (which I imagine could be a few months), then the FAI researchers might be enhanced for most of the M-year period before competitors make AGI.
I think you’re assuming M is really low. My intuition is that many of these enhancements wouldn’t require much more than a well-funded team and years of work with today’s technology (but fewer years with proto-AI), and that N is much smaller than M. But this depends a lot on the details of the enhancement problems and on the current state of biotechnology and bioinformatics, and I don’t know very much. Are there people associated with MIRI and such who work on human bioenhancement?