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James_Miller comments on Contrarian LW views and their economic implications - Less Wrong Discussion
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Genetic engineering for intelligence will be a game changer. I don't know when it will start, but as soon as we can reliably produce children with, say, 130 or above IQs markets will anticipate higher future economic growth.
My initial reaction was
But then I actually worked it out in excel and the NPV triples. So thank you for the good suggestion!
Given the current political climate, I think it's likely that those children will be first born in non-Western countries.
My money's on China.
Given the theme of the thread I must ask: in what exact way? Chinese Stocks? Australian Commodities? Currencies? Short Taiwan?
我决定读中文. So technically I guess I invested my time, not money.
Good answer, one I hadn't thought of.
I hardly think that's a consensus view. The timelines simply don't match up. In the generational lead time it takes to develop genetic engineering for intelligence, we'll have the tools (medical nanotechnology) to do the same in any human.
I don't see why that would be true. The GWAS and embryo selection approach is basically atheoretical and can affect intelligence at all points in life: you take millions of variants, run a giant regression, and select embryos based on the regression score. You have no idea what each variant does, why it does it, when it does it, or how; all you know is that it seems to increase scores a little bit. And you can do this approach in the complete absence of any understanding of what a brain is or a neuron is.
We will? So the biologists will be able to reverse-engineer the thousands of relevant variants, figure out exactly why they work, and then we'll be given nearly-magical nanobots which don't come close to existing right now which will be able to implement each variant?
Even if we had those nanobots, why would you expect that to work? Aren't there lots of possible changes to intelligence which only work in a narrow developmental window and ideally start at conception? For example, iodine: giving people iodine as adults seems to do zilch for increasing intelligence (once a cretin, always a cretin). How would medical nanotechnology fix that?
I said generational lead time because each iteration takes... one generation. If such procedures were enacted today, the first kids won't be educated and having an impact in the workforce until ~25 years from now. I personally rate a better than 50% chance that molecular nanotechnology capabilities will arrive sooner than that.
And what do you rate that each of an estimated 10,000 different genetic variants with different effects at different developmental windows will have been reverse-engineered by biologists/neurologists to the point where they can be safely applied to healthy humans and pass long-term clinical trials, especially given that the variants have to be found first and are applicable immediately to embryo selection if anyone wants to?
I think that's absurdly optimistic a view about the speed of applied medical therapies.
That's entirely not necessary when you have the tools to go in there and make targetted changes. In a post-human world, genetic code means very little.
We can make 'targetted changes' in adults' iodine levels. It doesn't do anything.
True, but if it were a consensus it would already be reflected in financial market prices.
Possibly, but this would give us even more economic growth.