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gwern comments on Contrarian LW views and their economic implications - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.