The Mugwumpery

Ives Parr is interested in the effects of genetic enhancement of children, which does seem likely to be a thing pretty soon, since the technology seems to be available, at least some parents clearly want to do it, and some jurisdiction or other in the world (Thailand? Singapore? The Philippines?) seems likely to allow it. That’s enough for it to start happening.

I think Parr’s thoughts miss what seem to me the most interesting potential consequences:

1 – As people get smarter, the way they think may change.

My personal observation has been that people with highish IQs (~115 to 135) are more leftist than most. It’s not clear to me if the same is true of people with extremely high IQs (> 140).

Given that leftist societies tend to collapse, I wonder about the social consequences of rising median population IQs.

(I may be just conflating education effects with intelligence effects, in which case nevermind.)

2 – More important, this is a first step down a path of recursive genetic modification. We’ve some idea of how we’d change our children, if we could. We have less idea of how those children – different from us – will choose to change their own children, etc. down the generations. The path seems unpredictable, potentially chaotic, and may lead to extinction.

I don’t think we have any good reason to think that after 5 or 10 generations of such changes, the result will look anything at all like present humans.

(This is similar to the “AI explosion” recursive improvement argument.)