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I hardly see this as an insurmountable problem, especially when more advanced plastic surgery makes aesthetics entirely a matter of choice. It all seems tractable to me, but then again I'm not overly beholden to the human form, if the cost of raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible requires sacrificing some facial diversity, I couldn't care less!
You don't want that anyway.
Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.
It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.
Dawg, what do you think the robots are for? We're operating under very different impressions on how a society with an IQ floor of 150 will operate. If they can't manage that, then I doubt they were at the IQ range in the first place.
If it happens that making robots to clean toilets is more trouble than assigning people to toilet duty, I expect the 150 IQs to clean toilets.
If
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If assigning 150 IQs to toilets results in a "mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top," then that seems to mean it causes quite a lot of trouble. I'm not sure that making robots to clean toilets is less trouble, but I would guess that a society filled with 150+ IQs would be able to accomplish this level of robotics without too much trouble, likely less trouble than comes about when a mass of 150-IQ angry losers applying their smarts to manipulate society to place themselves at the top. Then again, perhaps a mass of 150-IQ angry losers wouldn't be much trouble at all if the rest of society is all 180-IQ or something.
Hard to say without seeing it play out empirically which will actually be more trouble.
What it looks like to me is that we're not lacking in 150 IQ people as much as we lack in resources/cooperation required to obtain them, and cooperation doesn't magically spawn from enough smart people. Plenty of smart people are in politics and other zero-sum pursuits.
The historic record is replete with people's who, if they had the knowledge and intelligence to put the resources available to good use would have been unbelievably better off. It is every previous generation of man. What makes today so special?
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Sufficiently advanced plastic surgery is a good response, and I don't think it is necessarily MORE magical than perfect germline editing for intelligence anyway - we're already in science fiction territory here anyway.
That said, I do find the idea of raising everyone as close to "maximum intelligence possible" to have a few other issues... what levels of autism/aspergers/other disorders are you willing to tolerate in exchange? There've been a lot of discussions on here and in other HBD spaces about how IQ isn't actually an unalloyed good, and I think the "maximum" intelligence reachable is more a matter of making certain trade-offs rather than just assembling every single high-IQ allele. There's even a specific mutation which boosts IQ but also causes blindness - if you're going for the maximum IQ, do you have that mutation?
I fail to see how it's "magical" in the least, if you're willing to grant that scientific progress exists and there are no fundamental physical limitations preventing it. Science fiction seems to be doing quite well, since we have reusable rockets, AI and millions of other things that once upon a time didn't exist, were speculated to exist, and then did exist. Someone in the 1960s reading their best hard scifi would be doing a lot better at predicting the modern world than someone who dismissed it all out of hand.
Quite a lot, if it was strictly unavoidable (which I strongly dispute). High functioning autism is an entirely different beast than the low IQ form. Most of them are functional and productive individuals, even if they might be better off without it.
Given that I expect cybernetic eyes on par with real ones to be very plausible, in that case why would I care? I don't even care about being biological at all, and even our current AI which outperform the average human in most cognitive tasks are not autistic in the least. In a world where we didn't have eye replacements, I wouldn't take that tradeoff.
We also already know that there are people with very high IQ figures who are clearly not autistic, so at the very least my approach is directionally better, even if we need to halt before true "maximum" intelligence at the cost of being a brain in a jar (something I would personally be fine with).
I was using magic in the Arthur C. Clarke sense, hence why I said "sufficiently advanced". Sorry if I was being unclear, I just wanted to establish that when we're talking about this perfect germline editing tech then super advanced plastic surgery is probably within reach too and hence relevant to the conversation.
I think that in many cases the social difficulties and the high IQ are separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon - you can't get one without at least the risk of the other. While there's definitely a decent amount of low-hanging fruit (and a lot of it doesn't even need to involve genetics - proper nutrition from conception and beyond, ensuring no oxygen deprivation at early ages, etc) I think that you're going to run out of low-hanging fruit and start running into the trade-off zone. As I've said before, IQ is not an unalloyed good - we can just observe the world and notice that there are environments which select for it and environments which actually select against it. Some of these tradeoffs we don't give a shit about in the future, like longer development times and nutritional requirements, but some of them we very much will care about (blindness, social difficulties, higher rates of neurological disorders as seen in Ashkenazim etc). There's a decent chance that we live in a world where you'd be able to get a baseline level of enhancement by clearing out the low-hanging fruit but eventually reach a point where you'd have to start taking risks - i.e. hearing a doctor present an option with "This configuration will result in an incredibly high IQ, but at the same time there'll be a moderate risk that they end up with disorder."
My personal theory is that autism/aspergers represent a developmental failure that grows more likely with certain combinations of alleles that lead to higher IQ. That supports both the existence of non-autistic individuals with a high IQ and the notion that there are risks associated with it. But that said it is just my personal theory and I haven't done any real scientific study on the matter, so take it with an awful lot of salt.
However there's another issue that we've walked into here by using the word intelligence rather than, say, g. Given that we know a lot of political beliefs are biologically heritable, there's a decent case to be made that the various moral foundations that give rise to political opinions are ultimately genetic in basis. When you're selecting for intelligence, are you going to pick the alleles that make people more conservative or more liberal? There are plausible arguments that either side represents an increase in functional intelligence in the world, though at the same time that's also dependent upon the environment (a gene that makes you a hawk is a great idea in a world with nothing but doves, but that doesn't mean being a hawk is the optimal strategy all the time). Similarly, you can make the case that the intelligence required to be a really compelling artist in certain mediums is actually qualitatively different and mutually exclusive with the cognitive traits required to be a world-class performer in other fields.g doesn't really have political connotations in the sense that it is pure problem-solving ability, but "intelligence" is a word with a much broader meaning that makes things a lot more complicated.
The blindness is neurological so this won't actually help.
If you don't care about biology at all then you don't need to bother with germline editing and just go straight to making the AI. On that note, I don't think you can really make a good comparison between our current AI and the human brain - they just aren't the same thing, and in either case I've definitely seen autistic behaviour from ChatGPT and various other LLMs. But at this point we've stopped talking about anything resembling current technology and entered the realm of magic/post singularity tech that we cannot talk about sensibly.
Thanks for the clarification, while I accept that in most times and places, pinning your hopes and dreams on technological advancement within your lifetime is certainly fraught, we're living at a particularly unusual time after all.
My own understanding is that autism is basically too much of a good thing. Some traits that by themselves are not on the spectrum, if present in both parents, and passed onto the child, will produce outright autism which becomes a net negative.
Compare this to being heterozygous for the allele that produces sickle cell anemia if homozygous. Having only one copy is very handy if you live in an area where malaria is endemic, hence its commonality in much of Africa, but having two copies produces a disease that outweighs the benefits.
This is something I dimly recall, and haven't double checked, but it sounds plausible to me. We know that assortative mating in high IQ individuals working in fields where autism-adjacent traits are valuable tend to have more autistic offspring, such as when two engineers or computer scientists have kids.
Of course there's also autism that occurs de novo from mutations or developmental anomalies, but I don't have figured at hand for which is more frequent in absolute terms. I suspect that high functioning autism is likely the former.
Eh, I expect that to be solvable, but at the very least that particular state of affairs sounds rather unlikely to be actually true. Neuroplasticity is strong, hooking up an ordered stream of information into the brain almost inevitably produces the ability to interpret it, hence current trials of systems such as one where they use an electrical implant over the tongue that encodes visual images, which the blind come to recognize as a form of sight.
I wouldn't take that tradeoff if there was no available treatment, but at the end of the day, I suspect that we'll all end up on the pareto frontier where hardly anybody will be objectively better.
I am certainly less fussed about our civilization's stupidity in not exploring avenues like genetic enhancement because I expect post-singularity tech to make it moot.
I still think we should be investing a great deal more into it than we already do (close to zero), as a hedge if for some unforeseen reason the Singularity fails to materialize on schedule. After all, if we refrain from creating ASI that isn't provably aligned, we could still get a great deal of utility from having smarter humans running around.
Same reason we should be working on fusion, commercial space travel and so on, they're amazing right now, even if it turns out that a future AGI can solve them in about 2 minutes of wall clock time.
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