In general new tech goes first to the rich, and then the cost goes down & it becomes more widely available until all can share it. But there is a class of potential tech to which this logic does not apply. Doomsday tech; last period tech; ladder-kicking tech. For example,
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the genetic engineering you're talking about would only accelerate some of the natural consequences of improved nutrition and pediatric medicine (and possibly assortative mating)
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it does bring to mind an interesting thought experiment about how much an order of magnitude difference in pace of acceleration would matter though. probably quite a lot.
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Yeah. Think of it concretely - say 50,000 people each have at least one kid engineered to have an IQ 6SD higher than von Neumann. The kids form a community. What would they honestly think of we schlubs?
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And, spot on re accelerating assortative mating; but I think it has the potential to be qualitatively different due to the potential for a shift of very high magnitude not subject to noise.
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i honestly can't imagine a person with an IQ double that of Von Neumann, who was already a few steps past the line of "can interact with normals without friction" by most accounts. I wonder what the upper cognitive limit actually is. What kind of enhancements are possible?
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We don't know. Steve Hsu points out that there is a roughly 20SD difference between wild type & custom bred livestock traits, & g may be similar as it is also additive & massively polygenic. But it is beyond my ken to grasp such creatures.
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I can envision it only by reference to existing examples, but further in their direction, just as they were further in mine than the average person. I cannot envision past another 2SD further. "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss."
End of conversation
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