Thank you for writing this article! It was extremely informative and I am very pleased to learn about super-SOX. I have been looking for a process which can turn somatic cells into embryonic stem cells due to unusual personal reasons, so by uncovering this technology you have done me a great service. Additionally, I agree that pursing biological superintelligence is a better strategy than pursuing artificial superintelligence. People inherit some of their moral values from their parents, so a superintelligent human has a reasonable probability of being a good person as long as their parents are. Unfortunately, due to selection effects this is not a given.
Have you read the research of Suzana Herculano-Houzel, particularly her paper The Human Brain In Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-Up Primate Brain? This research argues that humans are intelligent for two reasons.
The primate brain is the only mammalian brain which maintains a nearly constant neuron density as the brain’s size increases. For comparison, the neuron density of rodents decreases as brain size increases.
A 10 fold increase in the number of primate neurons requires a 11 fold increase in brain volume.
A 10 fold increase in the number of rodent neurons requires a 35 fold increase in brain volume.
Humans have the largest primate brain.
I bring this up because I agree with the conclusions presented in Suzana’s work, with brain size being directly related to intelligence. I think it is better to select for a trait directly related to intelligence, brain size, than for a trait indirectly related to intelligence, such as IQ.
Good point. I am inherently drawn to the idea of increasing brain size because I favor extremely simple solutions whenever possible. However, a more focused push towards increasing intelligence will produce better results as long as the metric used for measuring intelligence is reliable.
I still think that increasing brain size will take a long time to reach diminishing returns due to its simplicity. Keeping all other properties of a brain equal, a larger brain should be more intelligent.
There is also one other wildly illegal approach which may be viable if you focus on increasing brain size. You might be able to turn a person, perhaps even yourself, into a biological superintelligence. By removing much of a person’s skull and immersing the exposed brain in synthetic cerebrospinal fluid, it would be possible to restart brain growth in an adult. You could theoretically increase a person’s brain size up to the point where it becomes difficult to sustain via biological or artificial means. With their physical abilities crippled, the victim must be connected to robot bodies and sense organs to interact with the world. I don’t recommend this approach and would only subject myself to it if humanity is in a dire situation and I have no other way of gaining the power necessary to extract humanity from it.