A much smarter human population will probably be morally, as well as cognitively, enhanced—the "evil genius" problem isn't necessarily a realistic one to worry about.
This is something I think I've noticed. If it is true, then why is it true? Some hypotheses:
And, in the interest of the virtue of evenness (I could just be inventing ways to confirm my preconceptions, after all), some hypotheses about why smart people are less moral than non-smart people:
That second list was much harder to come up with than the first one. Here's hoping I'm just plain right, and that's the reason why.
Anyone want to do some science to figure out which, if any, of these guesses is true?
Note: I am not affirming this hypothesis, I'm merely think it is worth considering.
I've tended to think that bioethics is maybe the most profoundly useless field in mainstream philosophy. I might sum it up by saying that it's superficially similar to machine ethics except that the objects of its warnings and cautions are all unambiguously good things, like cognitive enhancements and life extension. In an era when we should by any reasonable measure be making huge amounts of progress on those problems—and in which one might expect bioethicists to be encouraging such research and helping weigh it against yet another dollar sent to the Susan G. Komen foundation or whatever—one mostly hears bioethicists quoted in the newspaper urging science to slow down. As if doubling human lifespans or giving everyone an extra 15 IQ points would in some way run the risk of "destroying that which makes us human" or something.
Anyway, this has basically been my perspective as a newspaper reader—I don't read specialty publications in bioethics. And perhaps it should come as no surprise that bioethics' usefulness to mainstream discourse would be to reinforce status quo bias, whether that's a true reflection of the field or not. In any case, it was a welcome surprise to see an interview in The Atlantic with Allen Buchanan, who apparently is an eminent bioethicist (Duke professor, President's Council on Bioethics), entirely devoted to refuting common objections to cognitive enhancement.
Some points Buchanan makes, responding to common worries: