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PhilGoetz comments on This Failing Earth - Less Wrong
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Phil, I'm sorry if this sounds negative, but I don't understand this attitude at all. Intelligence is how accurately you can mine the information of the past in order to predict the future. You can't possibly think that all of our problems would go away if you gave everybody in the world a lobotomy? Or is there just some preferable lower-limit to intelligence we should engineer people to?
I think the historical problems with intelligence is an uneven increase in different fields or typical misuse. This isn't a problem with the tool, but the protocols and practices surrounding it.
It's not an "attitude".
If everyone's intelligence were increased, and society stayed the same, and society's problems stayed the same, that higher intelligence would do better at solving today's problems than our current intelligence.
But society wouldn't stay the same, and society's problems wouldn't stay the same. People would come up with more complicated organizations, more complicated laws, more complicated financial interactions (credit default swaps), more complicated social roles, et cetera.
We can only hope there is a level of intelligence at which people can appreciate this effect, and design societies that will avoid black swan crashes even at the cost of everyone's expected personal gain.