I'm a software developer by training with an interest in genetics. I am currently doing independent research on gene therapy with an emphasis on intelligence enhancement.
Take my comments with a grain of salt because I haven't thought too deeply about this, but if I think to myself what I would do if I was tasked with cutting government waste and modernizing IT systems, it would probably look something like what Musk is doing.
You have a sprawling complex of legacy systems, a federal bureaucracy that (let's face it) is institutionally obsessed with process, often at the expense of getting thigns done. You're tasked with cutting out fraud and bloat and increasing efficiency but everything is all over the place. So the first place you go is directly to the treasury, because at least government payments are centralized.
Could the power they've been given be abused? Yes of course. And I think it's worth keeping an idea of signs that the team Musk has hired is abusing its authority.
If someone knows something I'm missing, such as clear signs that they're using their power for self-dealing or to target political rivals, please let me know. But until I see such signs my attitude is mostly just "wait and see".
EDIT: After talking about this more with a friend, I'm more concerned about DOGE. I think many of the things they're doing are pretty blatantly unconstitional (changing allocation of funds in ways that a pretty obvious violations of article 1).
I personally find the defunding of USAID (especially PEPFAR) to be pretty horrible. That's one of the best programs the government invests money in.
I think a lot of their actions will get thrown out by the courts. But they'll do some damage in the meantime.
In hindsight, the answer here was "buy NVIDIA call options"
We're pretty firmly committed to at least 3. I think whether we have more than that depends on how well we're doing financially and whether the world is still around at that point.
Ask all your friends. How many are excited and aiming for 3+ children? Really excited and joyously motivated—not because it’s their duty for humanity and they’re on the EA burnout path. The life worth living is one with one child per couple among happy couples. Or 1.35 on average when you count the outliers.
I'm almost certainly somewhat of an outlier, but I am very excited about having 3+ children. My ideal number is 5 (or maybe more if I become reasonably wealthy). My girlfriend is also on board.
I just can't picture anything more joyous in a normal life (i.e. excluding upload enabled perma-jhana) than finding someone I deeply love and combining ourselves to make new people. It's a miracle that's even possible! If this wasn't a normal part of everyday life people would laugh at you for proposing such an absurd thing could ever be real.
EDIT: One more thing worth mentioning: If we ignore AGI for a second (not much point in talking about this otherwise), I think the long term solution to this problem is to create pro-natalist microcultures. Groups of friends living around each other raising their children in a shared environment. My dream is to live close to friends who also have a bunch of kids and raise them alongside people I love.
I know from reading reports of parents who have done or tried this that it's not trivial. One of the most difficult parts seems to be getting everyone to agree to a set of parenting standards and having the flexibility and acceptance to not require perfect adherence to every rule from every parent all the time. But we are still going to try to make this happen, probably somewhere close by the bay area.
I think the response to 9/11 was an outlier mostly caused by the "photogenic" nature of the disaster. COVID killed over a million Americans yet we basically forgot about it once it was gone. We haven't seen much serious investment in measures to prevent a new pandemic.
Seems like the only thing that could stop the train at this point is a few tens or hundreds of millions of deaths from out of control AI. Doesn't seem like anyone in government wants to cooperate to reduce the risk of everyone dying. Both the US and China have individually decided to roll the dice on creating machines they don't understand and may not be able to control.
I really should have done a better job explaining this in the original comment; it's not clear we could actually make someone with an IQ of 1700, even if we were to stack additive genetic variants one generation after the next. For one thing you probably need to change other traits alongside the IQ variants to make a viable organism (larger birth canals? Stronger necks? Greater mental stability?). And for another it may be that if you just keep pushing in the same "direction" within some higher dimensional vector space, you'll eventually end up overshooting some optimum. You may need to re-measure intelligence every generation and then do editing based on whatever genetic variants are meaningfully associated with higher cognitive performance in those enhanced people to continue to get large generation-to-generation gains.
I think these kinds of concerns are basically irrelevant unless there is a global AI disaster that hundreds of millions of people and gets the tech banned for a century or more. At best you're probably going to get one generation of enhanced humans before we make the machine god.
For a given level of IQ controlling ever higher ones, you would at a minimum require the creature to decide morals, ie. is Moral Realism true, or what is?
I think it's neither realistic nor necessary to solve these kinds of abstract philosophical questions to make this tech work. I think we can get extremely far by doing nothing more than picking low hanging fruit (increasing intelligence, decreasing disease, increasing conscientiousness and mental energy, etc)
I plan to leave those harder questions to the next generation. It's enough to just go after the really easy wins.
additionally believe that they would not be able to persuade lower IQ creatures of such values, therefore be forced into deception etc.
Manipulation of others by enhanced humans is somewhat of a concern, but I don't think it's for this reason. I think the biggest concern is just that smarter people will be better at achieving their goals, and manipulating other people into carrying out one's will is a common and time-honored tactic to make that happen.
In theory we could at least reduce this tendency a little bit by maybe tamping down the upper end of sociopathic tendencies with editing, but the issue is personality traits have a unique genetic structure with lots of non-linear interactions. That means you need larger sample sizes to figure out what genes need editing.
I can't really speak to your specific experience too well other than to simply say I'm sorry you had to go through that. We actually see that in general, mental health prevalence actually declines with increasing IQ. The one exception to this is aspbergers.
I do think it's going to be very important to address mental health issues as well. Many mental health conditions are reasonably editable; we could reduce the prevalence of some by 50%+ with editing.
Oops, thanks for the correction
I guess I somewhat agree with this, but I've also seen many examples of regulations that were passed in response to a particular incident decades ago, whose other non-incident related harms were completely ignored.
Compliance costs are real, and my experience dealing with the federal bureaucracy is that they're often completely ignored.