Judith Rich Harris might disagree.

I concede that, under some really extreme environmental conditions, any genetic advantages would be canceled out. So, you might actually be right if the IQ 80 mother is really bad. Money should be provided to poor families by the state, but only as long as they raise their child well - as determined by periodic medical checks. Any person, no matter the IQ, can do one thing reasonably well, and that is to raise children to maturity.

But I believe you are taking the importance of parenthood way too far, and disregarding the hereditarian point of view too easily. The blank-slate bias is something to be avoided. I would suggest you read this article by Matt Ridley.

Excerpt:

Today, a third of a century after the study began and with other studies of reunited twins having reached the same conclusion, the numbers are striking. Monozygotic twins raised apart are more similar in IQ (74%) than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (60%) and much more than parent-children pairs (42%); half-siblings (31%); adoptive siblings (29%-34%); virtual twins, or similarly aged but unrelated children raised together (28%); adoptive parent-child pairs (19%) and cousins (15%). Nothing but genes can explain this hierarchy.

I do not understand how this has anything to do with FAI

It has to do because FAI is currently a branch of pure philosophy. Without constant experimental feedback and contact with reality, philosophy simply cannot deliver useful results like science can.

This is not in fact "simple" to do. It's not even clear what level of details will be needed- just a neural network? Hormones? Glial cells? Modelling of the actual neurons?

Are there any other current proposals to build AGI that don't start from the brain? From what I can tell, people don't even know where to begin with those.

Are you sure you understand what FAI actually refers to? In particular, with p~~1, no living human qualifies as Friendly; even if they did, we would still need to solve several open problems also needed for FAI (like ensuring that value systems remain unchanged during self-modification) for a Friendly Upload to remain Friendly.

At some point you have to settle for "good enough" and "friendly enough". Keep in mind that simply stalling AI until you have your perfect FAI philosophy in place may have a serious cost in terms of human lives lost due to inaction.

(like ensuring that value systems remain unchanged during self-modification)

But what if the AI is programmed with a faulty value system by its human creators?

Such a program would be incredibly difficult to get implemented, and so is probably not worth it.

Fair enough, I was giving it as an example because it is possible to implement now - at least technically, though obviously not politically. Things like genome repair seem more distant in time. Cloning brilliant scientists seems like a better course of action in the long run, and without so many controversies. However, this would still leave the problem of what to do with those who are genetically more prone to violence, who are a net drag on society.

The society will be listening to its Einsteins and Feynmans once they band together and figure out how to use the dark arts to take control of the mass-media and universities away from their present owners and use them for their own, more enlightened goals. Or at least ingratiate themselves before the current rulers. They could promise to build new bombs or drones, for example. As for not being interested in solving FAI and these kinds of problems, that's really not a very convincing argument IMO. Throughout history, in societies of high average IQ and a culture tolerant of science, there was never a shortage of people curious about the world. Why wouldn't people with stratospheric IQ be curious about the world and enjoy the challenge of science, especially if they live in a brain-dead society which routinely engages in easy and boring trivialities? I mean, what would you choose between working on FAI or watching the Kardashians? I know what I would, even though my IQ is not very much above average and I'm really bad at probability problems.

There will never be a shortage of nerds and Asperger types out there, at least not for a long time, even with the current dysgenic trends.

I upvoted you for responding with a refutation and not simply downvoting.

Discussion of intelligence enhancement via reproductive biotechnology can occur smoothly here, e.g. in Wei Dai's post and associated comment thread several months ago. Looking at those past comments, I am almost certain that I could rewrite your comment to convey the same core points and yet have it be upvoted.

I think your comment was relatively ill-received because:

1) It threw in a number of other questionable claims on different topics without extensive support, rather than focusing on one at a time, and suggested very high confidence in the agglomeration while not addressing important variables (e.g. how much would a shift in the IQ distribution help vs hurt, how much does this depend on social norms rather than just the steady advance of technology, how much leverage do a few people have on these norms by participating in ideological arguments, and so forth).

2) The style was more stream-of-consciousness and in-your-face, rather than cautiously building up an argument for consideration.

3) There was a vibe of "grr, look at that oppressive taboo!" or "Hear me, O naive ideologically-blinkered folks!" That signals to some extent that one is in a "color war" mood, or attracted to the ideological high of striking for one's views against ideological enemies. That positively invites a messy political fight rather than a focused discussion of the prospects of reproductive biotechnology to improve humanity's prospects.

4) People like Nick Bostrom have written whole papers about biological enhancement, e.g. his paper on using evolutionary heuristics to look for promising enhancement possibilities. Look at its bibliography. Or consider the Less Wrong post by Wei Dai I mentioned earlier, and others like it. People focused on AI risk are not simply unaware of the behavioral genetics or psychometrics literatures, and it's a bit annoying to have them presented as some kind of secret knock-down argument.

I didn't downvote you, but I can see why someone reasonably might. Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

1. Whole brain emulation isn't the consensus best path to general AI. My intuition agrees with yours here, but you don't show any sign that you understand the subtleties involved well enough to be as certain as you are.
2. Lots of problematic unsupported assertions, e.g. "intelligent people generally have less children than those on the left half of the Bell curve", "[rich people] are also more likely to have above-average IQs, else they wouldn't be rich", and "[violence and docility are] in the genes and the brain that they produce".
3. Eugenics!?!
4. Ok, fine, eugenics, let's talk about it. Your discussion is naive: you assume that IQ is the right metric to optimize for (see Raising the Sanity Waterline for another perspective), you assume that we can measure it accurately enough to produce the effect you want, you assume that it will go on being an effective metric even after we start conditioning reproductive success on it, and your policy prescriptions are socially inept even by LW standards.
5. Also, it's really slow. That seems ok to you because you don't believe that we'll otherwise have recursive self-improvement in our lifetimes, but that's not the consensus view here either.

I'm not interested in debating any of this, I just wanted to give you an outside perspective on your own writing. I hope it helps, and I hope you decide to stick around.