Rob Lucas

Summary: Human genetic engineering could lead to intelligence enhancement that leads to genetic engineers who are better at genetic engineering (and research on pathways to improving intelligence). Which leads to a continuing process of greater and greater intelligence. This iterative process would be a human intelligence explosion. There’s a view that AI will hit a point where it begins an intelligence explosion: an AI system will be designed that is better at designing AI systems than its designers were. As such, it will be able modify its own design such that it, or a second generation version of it, will be created that is superior to it. And this next version will thus be sufficiently advanced that it can create a more advanced version. Etc. You end up with an iterative process whose next generation progress is based on its current state, and as such an exponential growth, at least until some limiting factor is reached. Hence, intelligence explosion. This seems like a possible outcome, though the absolute rate of change isn’t clear. But aside from computer intelligence, there’s another pathway to intelligences improving their own design: humans. With current genome reading technology we are identifying a myriad of genes related to intelligence. While each individual gene gives only a small effect, the interplay of many (hundreds) of such genes can be shown to have very large effects on IQ. While gene-therapy is in it’s early stages, it’s a current emerging technology that’s undergoing rapid progress. It is currently difficult to modify even individual genes in adult organisms: there are off target effects to worry about, it’s not possible to deliver the genes to every cell, the immune system will attack the viruses used for gene delivery, etc. But there is already progress in solving all of these problems. It’s not crazy to think that within a couple of decades we may be able to safely alter dozens or hundreds of genes in adult humans, and if no