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Notes -
Very.
The problem with the 'technological approach' to human capital is that its embracers never actually get around to it. They insist on Just One More Master's Degree and reason that they can mass produce geniuses eventually so why worry about it. In contrast, Sex Is Fun(go ahead, dispute it if you want), and women like babies. We had an AAQC recently from a woman who wanted another baby and thought it was a horrible idea, she just wanted one anyway. Making young women take care of robotic babies designed to discourage them from motherhood raises the teen pregnancy rate.
But go ahead, try to mass produce geniuses through technology. That's what South Korea thinks it's doing(yes, hangwon is pointless zero sum competition. They don't know that). The single digit number of their young will attain impressive credentials if they don't kill themselves first. No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies. Or expect AI to replace us until they paperclip maximize in their own solar system until the collapse of the local civilization turns it into something like Golgafrincham or Magrathea or Frogstar B or in fact most of the rest of Douglas Adams' cautionary tales because no one can figure out how to program common sense. Maybe AI fueled economic bubbles is the great filter of the fermi paradox, or maybe uber-k selection until the kids kill themselves rather than subject their own children to 18 hours a day of school is the great filter. Either way, the alien civilizations which make contact with us will be empire builders that seek to integrate conquered races into (a lower tier of)their power structure; the other alien races would just wipe us out rather than landing.
Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.
An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.
A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.
There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...
'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.
If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.
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