The Singularity

[Ravens_cry]

Actually, places like Somalia have mobile phones because it's cheaper to put in a cellular network than landlines.

[Carry2]

On the IQ front, I'll make the suggestion I always make whenever it comes up; everyone needs to read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould.

While I'm sympathetic to his intentions, Gould appears to have been a fraud.

I don't understand why this is even a bone of contention. Look, I would love to believe that social interventions alone will permit us to attain some kind of utopia. But the evidence that genes make a difference in life is absolutely overwhelming.

[Water_Bear]

While I'm sympathetic to his intentions, Gould appears to have been a fraud.

Hmm. That's fairly obnoxious. I'm going to have to check to see if his statistical analysis of IQ and g is accurate.

I don't understand why this is even a bone of contention. Look, I would love to believe that social interventions alone will permit us to attain some kind of utopia. But the evidence that genes make a difference in life is absolutely overwhelming.

And I've never said otherwise. The question is;

a) Is there such a thing as General Intelligence, or is it a statistical quirk which doesn't reflect the complexity of the human brain.
b) If so, is IQ measuring General Intelligence or is it measuring some other combination of factors?

Genetic modification has produced organisms with better memories, better problem solving skills, better spatial reasoning, and produced significant changes in personality. Selective breeding can make similar claims, albeit less efficiently. I think focusing on unambigious and easily measured heritable traits like this is going to provide more results and generate less controversy than searching for some kind of mystical 'g' factor.

-Edit-

It appears I've been operating on some incorrect information regarding the validity of IQ and it's heritability. I'll be bowing out now.

[Carry2]

-Edit-

It appears I've been operating on some incorrect information regarding the validity of IQ and it's heritability. I'll be bowing out now.

If you are the kind of person willing to adjust their views on the basis of fresh information, then you absolutely deserve to participate in this discussion. Honest.

I'll have to leave this thread here for another few days.

[hamishspence]

Otherwise you're down to Venus for potentially terraformable places. And Venus makes Mars look like a walk in the park. At least Mars won't roast you like a hotdog in a blast furnace.

Would Venus need to moved outward? That said, by the time technology has progressed to the point you can move planets around in a reasonable timeframe, most of the other problems may be trivial.

[warty goblin]

Would Venus need to moved outward? That said, by the time technology has progressed to the point you can move planets around in a reasonable timeframe, most of the other problems may be trivial.

Moving Venus outwards would help. Moving planets however is, as you say, way into science fiction territory. There's just no believable way to generate enough energy.

Venus does have the advantage over Mars that it's got reasonably close to Earth gravity. This makes it easier to keep an atmosphere, and less likely that your bones decide they're no longer necessary.

The downside is that it's way, way too hot, and the atmosphere is a toxic soup under extreme pressure. Building a manned base on Mars is hard. Building a manned base on Venus would be like living a kilometer under the ocean, if the ocean was 400 degrees Celsius.

[RPGuru1331]

Forgive me, but if you are assuming that (A) this procedure would somehow have to applied simultaneously to every child born on earth at once

Uh, yeah. It has to be applied at birth. It's rather the point. 700 trillion is lowballing it, even as a generational cost and even using your lowballed figures, because population will still go up, even if it is going to slow.

All of which ignores what I said: You have no idea how much money 700 trillion dollars actually is. You handwaved it as 'less than the sum invested in education', for christ sakes.

(B) that costs in the biotech sector will remain static indefinitely, then you appear to be the one making unrealistic assumptions.

Yes, that's totally the assumption I'm making, when I point out that if you're trying to prevent codified inequalities, you have to keep pace with the top of the line, not things that reach mass production and are cheap. Well done, you've caught onto my game. Hint: This doesn't help you at all.

Given that weaker students tend to drop out- or be actively ejected- from the educational system, yes, I imagine that there is a correlation. (Not that I disagree that our educational systems could stand drastic improvements, but that's another tangent.)

You know absolutely nothing about how schools actually operate in poorer conditions, do you? How those poor schools hold back smart or dedicated kids, often due to other issues entirely? This is fractal wrongness, and it's growing obnoxious. You need to go seriously work on your education on social, and scientific, issues.

A 20-point IQ boost works out statistically to roughly an extra 10K in earnings per year in the US, and it seems quite plausible that embryonic screening could select for other personality traits conducive to individual success (including some which might be harmful to society at large, which is part of what worries me.)

So less money on average than being a dude, going to a decent school, or being rich? And that's assuming IQ has a meaning?

Well... that would mean you are asserting that all variation in life outcomes springs from historical privilege.

I said nothing about how it works out for individuals, only for broad classes. It's what 'privilege' in this context tends to mean. An individual can always screw up, and say, be disowned or cast out or ruined. But as a class, they benefit from systemic inequality, and will continue to do so, on most axes it exists on. Those inequalities will make it easier to acquire further advantages, as well, even if individuals fail to act on their demonstrably greater opportunities.

There are actually a surprising number of millionaires out there, you know. And he's not talking about right now, he's talking about in 20 years.

And very few who actually can do construction. Even fewer who want to.

[Carry2]

I've been trying to think for a while about how best to continue this discussion. As far as I can see, there are a couple of recurring 'themes' going on here that might deserve being split off into separate threads, or benefit from an injection of genuinely fresh perspective. I'll try to enumerate them here, while saving specific replies to particular posters for another day.

* The first topic would be about the technical and economic feasibility of space travel, and the various motives one might have for colonising or terraforming other planets/moons in the solar system. While this is a fascinating topic to explore, I don't think it's directly related to the central question of GNR technologies and their ramifications over the next century or so. (Notwithstanding that GNR tech could well expedite space travel and terraforming in a number of ways.)

* The second topic would be about the other existential crises that our species might face over a similar timescale, ranging from peak oil, anthropogenic climate change, and potential demographic collapse owing to those and perhaps other factors, such as phosphorus depletion or nuclear exchange. Again, these are very interesting topics, but also probably merit their own thread. (Again, notwithstanding that GNR tech might help to address several of these problems, they are not directly related.)

* The third topic, which I think popped up mainly earlier in this thread and then got buried beneath the effort to establish that GNR technologies are likely to (A) be a big deal and (B) not automatically catastrophic, would be the question of just how radically our orthodox concepts of biological identity could be challenged by GNR techs, what kinds of society might emerge in response, and whether anything traditionally human would survive the transition.

* The fourth topic was an exploration of potential dystopian scenarios associated with GNR technology, coupled with speculation on how quickly these techs are likely to mature, whether it would be appropriate to contemplate some form of near-term government regulation in this area, and which forms of regulation would be both justified and enforceable. (The question of nature vs. nurture has come up a good deal, but I don't consider it a particularly intriguing topic, insofar as most controversy on this point is political, not scientific.)

* The final topic that I could see being covered, though I think it hasn't really been explored much so far, is the question of convergence (as distinct from accelerating/exponential progress)- the idea that genetics, nanotech and robotics are likely to become increasingly intertwined and complementary as our understanding of each advances. While we're at it, I think it may be fruitful to explore potential benefits stemming from the kind of self-knowledge/reliance that such technologies could offer.

.

[Carry2]

Just to elaborate a little bit on the final point:

* Technically speaking, we already have access to microscopic, self-replicating robots capable of building vast and complex structures out of locally-available materials. We call them, working up in scale, 'bacteria', 'trees' and 'human civilisation'. The problem is that our programming tools are still pretty messy.

* As our knowledge of the genes that influence behaviour increases, we are likely to gain more and more information about which neurochemical processes or aspects of brain anatomy account for which aspects of cognitive function. In other words, it is likely to be a significant contributor to our understanding of human intelligence.

* By analogy, a comprehensive understanding of human intelligence will most likely either enable, or require, the development of strong AI. (Because it will either give us a model to copy in software, or be needed for testing purposes.)

* Truly optimising the environmental factors that contribute to our personal development will, by virtue of the Good Regulator Theorem, require a thorough understanding of how our minds interpret and adapt to information about our surroundings- which is to say, the mechanism of our intelligence. For this reason, there are grounds to suspect that maximally effective social policy may be linked to strong AI.

[deuterio12]

* The final topic that I could see being covered, though I think it hasn't really been explored much so far, is the question of convergence (as distinct from accelerating/exponential progress)- the idea that genetics, nanotech and robotics are likely to become increasingly intertwined and complementary as our understanding of each advances. While we're at it, I think it may be fruitful to explore potential benefits stemming from the kind of self-knowledge/reliance that such technologies could offer.

That would be because "potential benefits" for "potential technologies" in a "potential future" is borderline delusional wishing if you ask me.

When humanity reached the moon everbydody started predicting that by this year we would've colonized the moon, if not a good chunk of the solar system.

There would also be half a dozen super computers out there controling pretty much everything.

Instead most space programs ran out of money and small personal computers are all the rage. But man are they dumb and still need constant human supervision, not to prevent them from rebelling but just to keep them working.

Now call me a pessimist if you want, but this thread would be much better served by discussing actual technology advances, not borderline divine miracles. Immortality? Super beauty and intellegence whitout drawbacks? Reaching unreachable places? Pfft, people have been dreaming of that since the dawn of time pretty much.

So why not focus on actual recent advances and things that could be reliably implemented in the near future? Because no, super-cyborgs won't be coming anytime soon, in particular because they've been predicted for decades now and still failed to materialize. Whatever comes next will most certainly not be something that people have tried and failed to achieve before my parents were born, it will be something completey unexpected at that time (just like telling someone from the 50s about net and smartphones would have got you a good laughs at best).

[Carry2]

When humanity reached the moon everbody started predicting that by this year we would've colonized the moon, if not a good chunk of the solar system...

Well, yes. But I don't consider this to invalidate speculation on GNR technologies any more than mid-70s articles on global cooling mean that we get to ignore CO2 emission standards today.

Now call me a pessimist if you want, but this thread would be much better served by discussing actual technology advances, not borderline divine miracles. Immortality? Super beauty and intellegence whitout drawbacks?

Well, not neccesarily without drawbacks. But maybe with drawbacks that aren't terribly relevant to someone living in a post-industrial society.

So why not focus on actual recent advances and things that could be reliably implemented in the near future?...

Well, I was going to save that for some of the replies to specific posters, but... given the amount of coverage that's been given to an assortment of equally unproven nightmare scenarios, where's the harm in a little speculative optimism?

In any case, I would certainly be happy to discuss some examples of real-world present-day technological advances, as long as this is not somehow presented as exclusive to more far-flung extrapolations. (In fairness, this is a thread in Media Discussions, which suggests a certain leaning toward tropes found in sci-fi and other fantastical literature.)

[jseah]

In any case, I would certainly be happy to discuss some examples of real-world present-day technological advances, as long as this is not somehow presented as exclusive to more far-flung extrapolations. (In fairness, this is a thread in Media Discussions, which suggests a certain leaning toward tropes found in sci-fi and other fantastical literature.)

RE a futuristic but not that farfetched thing:
Google Glass + Gesture Interface + Mental Interface + AR MMORPG = ???

[Carry2]

I've started up two new threads for the purpose of discussing some of the topics that came up beforehand-
Beyond Earth: Offworld Human Colonisation
We're Already Doomed: Existential threats for the 21st Century


I guess, just to go back to the OP's question (could self-aware AI trigger an exponential feedback loop of design improvements (A) ever happen and (B) do so within our lifetime,) it might be helpful to do a broad summary of the kinds of GNR-related tech applications that pop up in the literature. I'm going to rate them, somewhat, subjectively in terms of plausibility or proven-ness.


Category A: Already here, awaiting market penetration, mass production
* 3D/matter printers in the home
* Labour-saving robotics/automation for most essential jobs
* PGD/IVF, curative gene therapies
Timeframe for impact: Within next few decades.

Category B: Probably gonna happen if you wait long enough
* Designer babies, longevity treatments, designer ecology
* Biomechanical (cyborg) interface, post-silicon computation
* Whole-brain simulation, strong AI, virtual reality
Timeframe for impact: Assuming civilisation doesn't implode, a century or two.

Category C: Largely unproven, but can't be ruled out as impossible
* Superhuman/gestalt 'friendly borg' intelligence, skill downloads
* Radical body-modification/breakdown of species-barrier
* Advanced self-assembling nanotech, post-scarcity replicators
Timeframe for impact: ???


As far as I can see, the major long-term obstacle to the development of Strong AI would be some kind of political rebellion against research in these areas, related to rising unemployment and/or spiritual ennui as more and more economic roles are filled by autonomous robots. (And if Moravec's Paradox is to be believed, the scientists themselves have as much to be worried about as the proles.)

So while, personally speaking, I wouldn't entirely rule out the technical possibility of strong AI being developed within the next 50 years, the more interesting question may be whether, by then, we would still want it.

.

[Carry2]

All of which ignores what I said: You have no idea how much money 700 trillion dollars actually is. You handwaved it as 'less than the sum invested in education', for christ sakes.

Dear RPGGuru,

Please understand that you appear to be a reasonably intelligent person, and it is for this reason that I find our conversation difficult for me to continue, because I find it hard to believe that your grasp of the pertinent math is genuinely this bad.


Let me go over this again. Let us assume that giving a child a decent education, at a cost of 5,000 dollars per year for 20 years, will raise their average income per-annum during their 30-year working life by 30,000 dollars. This works out to a 100,000 dollar outlay, for a 900,000 dollar return, or a 8X profit margin, economically speaking. I think you will agree these are quite generous estimates.

Let us equally assume that advances in embryonic selection or active gene tailoring will, at some point in the future, on average boost a child's IQ by 20 points, thus raising average earnings during their 30-year working life by 10,000 dollars per year, at a one-time cost of 10,000 dollars. This works out to a 10,000 dollar outlay, for a 300,000 dollar return, or a 29X profit margin, economically speaking.

Now, which of these approaches are you going to spend money on first? The one that gives you back 8 dollars for every dollar spent, or 29 dollars? And which is going to be more attractive to, and better for, developing nations or lower-class families with limited financial resources?


Note, here, that I am assuming the following:
* That educational achievement and IQ are totally independant variables (which is unlikely, given that the odds of a person with sub-average IQ finishing college are close to nil.)
* That only IQ could be modified through genetic screening (which is unlikely, as there are many other personality traits which contribute to economic outcomes that may well have some genetic component.)
* That the cost of embryonic selection/gene tailoring has not come down substantially by the time that most genetic factors associated with IQ have been isolated (which is unlikely, given impending developments.)

Change any of the above, and the economic argument for gene tailoring only becomes more compelling. Heck, strictly speaking, you could break even with today's technology:

How common will PGD become? Is it possible that one day every citizen of an industrialized nation will have survived, as an embryo, a PGD screen? Most commentators who have considered such a scenario—which was portrayed in the movie GATTACA—do not think so (Silver, 2000). Their main argument is that PGD—and the need to use IVF—is too expensive, inconvenient and limited in application to ever become widespread. They have a point: nature has contrived a cheap, easy and enjoyable way to conceive a child; IVF is none of these things.

However, the difficulties might be exaggerated. A course of IVF in the UK costs between £7,000 and £10,000—expensive, but cheaper than a mid-range car, and trivial compared with the costs of raising a child. Conception rates using IVF are generally lower compared with the old-fashioned method, but that is because many of the women who undergo IVF are relatively old (CDC, 2003). For women under 35 who have no fertility problems, the success rate per cycle is greater than 50%, which is comparable to natural monthly conception rates. However, perhaps the most important evidence against the idea that IVF—and PGD—will not catch on is the observation that it already has. At present, about 1% of Americans are conceived using IVF, and each year 4% of Danes start their life in a petri dish (Nyboe Andersen & Erb, 2006). It seems possible that if the cost of IVF decreases further and the number of PGD screens expands, an increasing number of parents will choose not to subject their children to the vicissitudes of natural conception and the risk of severe genetic disease.

Ultimately, the argument for a universal, total mutation screen will be based on its economic costs and benefits. It is too soon to draw up a detailed balance sheet, but we can suggest some numbers. Congenital mental retardation afflicts about 51,000 children annually in the USA; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each afflicted child will cost the US economy $1 million over the course of his or her life—that is, a collective cost of $51 billion (CDC, 2004). This does not include the social and emotional cost that parents assume in raising a mentally disabled child, which all but defy quantification.

I am also skeptical that the rich will be able to buy significantly better gene tailoring than the poor, given that the main difference between primitive and advanced forms of such treatments would be more or less information about the genes responsible for various phenotypic traits, and once you have that data, distributing it is pretty cheap these days, if not downright impossible to keep secret. It's not like the difference between buying a Volkswagon and buying a Porsche- it's more like the difference between Dr. Suess and printing a chapter from Ulysses. And even if it were true, this would not be an argument for banning the technology, any more than the rich being able to afford larger libraries could justify burning books.

.

[RPGuru1331]

Please understand that you appear to be a reasonably intelligent person, and it is for this reason that I find our conversation difficult for me to continue, because I find it hard to believe that your grasp of the pertinent math is genuinely this bad.

Are you still not getting that your proposed assumptionos fail on 2 incredibly important levels?

1: If everyone gets 20 points of IQ (IE we have utterly prevented social inequality from cropping up on this axis), then <b>nothing changes</b>. Average income doesn't go up, because now everyone is 20 IQ points smarter. Do you not understand that this doesn't make janitor jobs go away, nor does it spontaneously generate more positions in IT? Is it just straight up beyond you?
2: Do you have any idea what 700 trillion dollars could do for just plain old regular education, on a planetary scale? Seriously, it's getting obnoxious that you don't seem to remember that this proposed way to balance things actually, factually comes at the expense of other possible ways to fight inequality, because it is measured in dollars.

* That the cost of embryonic selection/gene tailoring has not come down substantially by the time that most genetic factors associated with IQ have been isolated (which is unlikely, given impending developments.)

You ALREADY ASSUMED THAT in your 10k number. Further, you missed another critical point, presuming, instead, to continue parroting that when you speak. To wit:

Yes, that's totally the assumption I'm making, when I point out that if you're trying to prevent codified inequalities [by introducing gene tailoring for everyone], you have to keep pace with the top of the line, not things that reach mass production and are cheap. Well done, you've caught onto my game. Hint: This doesn't help you at all.

Your'e not understanding that the target isn't what's cheap, but what the rich are doing, aren't you?

I am also skeptical that the rich will be able to buy significantly better gene tailoring than the poor,

You are so utterly clueless as to who has 10k available per child to start with that it is only not staggering because you just keep talking and spewing more and more ignorant things.

Seriously, you've said so many wrong things that rebutting them would take for-freaking Ever, because you keep on saying more, and more, and MORE ignorant things.

And even if it were true, this would not be an argument for banning the technology, any more than the rich being able to afford larger libraries could justify burning books.

Uh, considering that owning books is a symptom, rather than a potential cause, of systematic inequality, then I'd say the analogy is a massive failure. This isn't some trifling toy, or entertainment, like books are. And I didn't even propose banning them, because I don't even think this will actually happen. You are, again, making ridiculously presumptuous statements based on what are generally ignorant laypeople talking about science fiction they'd like to see happen in the real world, and at least staying away from ftl.

Well, yes. But I don't consider this to invalidate speculation on GNR technologies any more than mid-70s articles on global cooling mean that we get to ignore CO2 emission standards today.

Which is funny, because the global cooling articles (All 10 of them - not an exaggeration) were closer to the baseless speculation of how we were going to have moon colonies, or indeed - your own rambling about what the future holds, apparently based on what you think would be cool, rather than fact.

Except even *THAT* is too insulting to the global cooling articles; they were wrong, but they were wrong in understandable ways, which puts them way above the jetpack/mooncolonization stuff.

Well, not neccesarily without drawbacks. But maybe with drawbacks that aren't terribly relevant to someone living in a post-industrial society.

If they were real, then maybe so. Except there's no reason to think they are until we're closer than "cookbooks written in a language we don't understand."

* Technically speaking, we already have access to microscopic, self-replicating robots capable of building vast and complex structures out of locally-available materials. We call them, working up in scale, 'bacteria', 'trees' and 'human civilisation'. The problem is that our programming tools are still pretty messy.

Do you know what a 'robot' is, and what the word means? And do you not understand how that has nothing to do with von neumann robots?

* As our knowledge of the genes that influence behaviour increases, we are likely to gain more and more information about which neurochemical processes or aspects of brain anatomy account for which aspects of cognitive function. In other words, it is likely to be a significant contributor to our understanding of human intelligence.

There isn't even good evidence that genes directly or reliably influence behavior - talk about assuming your conclusion! That doesn't mean knowing the effects won't be useful, but that doesn't mean the wildly optimistic things you assume have a good chance of happening.

* By analogy, a comprehensive understanding of human intelligence will most likely either enable, or require, the development of strong AI. (Because it will either give us a model to copy in software, or be needed for testing purposes.)

Man, Singulitarians just specialize in useless predictions, don't they? This is a little more definite than normal, but this is an open-ended prediction that you can point to later and say "Hah, I was right!". Granted, you're not claiming to have a model, so it's not as obnoxious a failure.

(Notwithstanding that GNR tech could well expedite space travel and terraforming in a number of ways.)

Well yeah. And the discovery of magic could lead to the creation of superhumans. But that doesn't make Guilty Gear fanfiction useful for predicting the future.

I am also skeptical that the rich will be able to buy significantly better gene tailoring than the poor, given that the main difference between primitive and advanced forms of such treatments would be more or less information about the genes responsible for various phenotypic traits, and once you have that data, distributing it is pretty cheap these days,

....
So like, I'm going out on a limb, in that I'm not, and guessing you really don't know what sets apart premium versions from normal ones in anything, huh?

[Frozen_Feet]

Carry2: raising average IQ by 20 points is excessive according to data I've got from The Bell Curve and other works. IQ seems to have diminishing returns - being a "little smarter", or having IQ of 105 to 110 when the standard deviation is 15, creates most of the difference in income. Being "way smarter", IQ 120+ with same deviation, does not help nearly as much.

EDIT: Also, RPGGuru has a point. While tasks dictate minimum intelligence (ie. you won't become a professor with IQ 80), intelligence does not dictate minimum tasks - you can still be unemployed or a janitor at IQ 121. I am. Sudden increase in average human intelligence does not remove social inequity, nor does it make minimal wage jobs disappear. And in most cases, someone has to do those.

But while I haven't had time this night to get into details of your arguments, in general I agree with you that genetic screening and selection of humans could improve... well, pretty much anything about the human condition. Breeding works, we know it does, and any form of genetic manipulation is just breeding version two-point-ou. It's just that breeding humans (in whatever way) has such political and social implications it runs into Godwins Law faster than you can shout "Nazis in Space!"

[Wardog]

But while I haven't had time this night to get into details of your arguments, in general I agree with you that genetic screening and selection of humans could improve... well, pretty much anything about the human condition. Breeding works, we know it does, and any form of genetic manipulation is just breeding version two-point-ou. It's just that breeding humans (in whatever way) has such political and social implications it runs into Godwins Law faster than you can shout "Nazis in Space!"

Also, breeding new traits into anything takes many generations, which in the case of humans means a very long time. (And I'm not sure genetic engineering and the like would make much difference to that, because you'd still need to wait for the children to mature and see how they turned out in order to know that you were breeding the right traits. And then repeate it enough times to be able to distinguish the genetic variation from all other source of variation). Quite possibly so long that whatever social/political/environmental/economic situation you were trying to breed people to suit had changed by before you got there.

[Frozen_Feet]

With modern technology, we would be able to get significant results in 75 years, though the costs might be prohibitive. However, large scale human experimentation is required for such. We could pretest some genetic alterations with fast breeding mammals like mice (as we already do, as a matter of routine), but in the end, since we're altering humans, we need human subjects.

Things that would be required to make such breeding program economical would be:

1. Cheap way of mapping human genome
2. Cheap and reliable way of altering human gametes
3. Cheap and reliable artificial fertilization
4. A large number of young, healthy women selected for desireable traits essentially willing to become hired wombs. 300 would be the bare minimum, assuming each gives birth to 3 babies at least.
5. Lots of money and infrastructure to provide our mothers and their altered offspring with standardized living environment, nutrition and education

What we could potentially achieve for our altered population:

1. Select out all known genetically inheritable defect. (Achievable in the initial selection process for mother candidates)
2. Select out most environmentally caused defects. (Achievable through regulation of living conditions)
3. Implement some minor fixes with apparent and known mechanisms, such as giving all girls or even all kids tetrachromia. (Should be achievable via modern methods.)
4. Improve muscular and cardiovascular fitness (Ditto, done in mice.)
5. Select for desireable personality traits (We've done this with dogs before Darwin was a twink in his parents' eyes.)
6. Prolong lifespan (done in already in fruitflies)
7. Improve metabolism (done in mice)
8. Improve intelligence - or at least a get a better picture of how hereditary it is, since our test controlled for education.

... really, after all the crazy things we've done with mice already, we could do a lot within the span of one generation.

[Carry2]

1: If everyone gets 20 points of IQ (IE we have utterly prevented social inequality from cropping up on this axis), then <b>nothing changes</b>. Average income doesn't go up, because now everyone is 20 IQ points smarter. Do you not understand that this doesn't make janitor jobs go away, nor does it spontaneously generate more positions in IT?

Excuse me, but average income (or quality of life) is entirely likely to go up in meaningful terms, because IQ increases the efficiency with which a wide variety of economic functions can be performed. Stock analysts tend to have higher IQ not because they picked that criterion out of a hat, but because candidates with higher IQ tend to pick better stocks. Successful artists and composers tend to have well-above average IQs, even if this kind of cognitive faculty is tough to measure, probably because G-factor feeds into spatial and auditory processing. Kids with higher IQ go further in education because they absorb and retain information more easily, and with less supervision.

Most economic functions that cannot be trivially automated benefit to some degree or another from analytic or creative problem-solving. In which case problem-solving ability can always be of absolute social benefit, not just a relative individual advantage. (Even if that social benefit was more free time, rather than more goods/services.)

Now, sure, the toilets will still have to be scrubbed. But unlike today, where a significant minority of people basically have few other job prospects, in a world where all the janitors could just as easily be doctors or software architects, they will at least be heavily compensated for their trouble. Or, heck, maybe invent robots to do it.

2: Do you have any idea what 700 trillion dollars could do for just plain old regular education, on a planetary scale?...
You ALREADY ASSUMED THAT in your 10k number...

Going by the assumptions I outlined before, less than an equivalent sum invested in gene-tailoring/embryonic-selection. I'm sorry, but unless environment literally counts for 10X more than genetics, the economic argument is simply overpowering. Even if the cost comes straight out of the budget for other social services. And as I referenced in my previous post, 10-20K is the present-day cost of PGD/IVF, and that is likely to come down in the near future.

Besides, as I covered before, you're not viewing this in perspective. Parents already expend sums on their children in excess of 10,000 dollars, each and every single year (on cars, mortgages, school fees, etc..) I'm talking about a one-time payment of 10K, probably less over time, which will benefit the child for the rest of their life, and all of their natural descendants.

One could easily imagine some kind of loan-payment scheme for the purpose, or government sponsorship based on projected economic gains (just as they pay for public education.) And in any case, the number of couples who would actually volunteer for the procedure will (actually already is, and should be) initially small, and expand gradually over several decades, as the functions of more genes are clarified and clinical follow-ups watch for side-effects.

Uh, considering that owning books is a symptom, rather than a potential cause, of systematic inequality...

Excuse me, but you have argued that access to education is a major, if not dominant factor in determining individual and social economic outcomes. Access to books is a means of education (and the rich can also afford going to Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, etc.) Therefore, by your logic, the rich having access to more high-quality books (and top-notch education) should create an insuperable barrier to social mobility.

Now, does that mean we should ban books and education, or does that mean we should strive to make them as universally accessible as possible? Given that it's a clear economic and social win to do so?

There isn't even good evidence that genes directly or reliably influence behavior...

Of course not. I'm sure the tiny fairies in our heads are responsible for regulating neurotransmitter production.

I'm afraid I didn't see much point in responding to the remainder of your post, as there was little factual argument to buttress the inflammatory remarks.

.

[Carry2]

Carry2: raising average IQ by 20 points is excessive according to data I've got from The Bell Curve and other works. IQ seems to have diminishing returns - being a "little smarter", or having IQ of 105 to 110 when the standard deviation is 15, creates most of the difference in income. Being "way smarter", IQ 120+ with same deviation, does not help nearly as much.

This is true. But given that the vast majority of the population lie within 100+/-15 IQ, raising the average by 20 points would be a major benefit. (Incidentally, there is some evidence that, although having an IQ above 120 doesn't translate into much extra income, it often makes you better at the job. So that could be a net social win, even if it's not an individual jackpot.)

Again, I want to stress that IQ is, obviously, far from the end-all and be-all of desireable genetic traits (and it isn't 100% genetic anyway.) It's simply one of the more well-studied examples. Health is probably going to receive more attention at first, and personality is arguably more important.

With modern technology, we would be able to get significant results in 75 years, though the costs might be prohibitive. However, large scale human experimentation is required for such. We could pretest some genetic alterations with fast breeding mammals like mice (as we already do, as a matter of routine), but in the end, since we're altering humans, we need human subjects.

Oh, very true. Like I outlined earlier in the thread, this is probably going to go through channels of approval very similar to how the pharmaceutical industry handles drugs- starting with cell cultures and protein simulation, then animal studies, and finally clinical trials with volunteer subjects.

This is already happening with simple-to-characterise but phenotypically-pronounced disorders like Down's Syndrome and dwarfism, and the definition of 'serious' physical or intellectual disability, for better or worse, is likely to expand over time.

1. Cheap way of mapping human genome
2. Cheap and reliable way of altering human gametes
3. Cheap and reliable artificial fertilization
4. A large number of young, healthy women selected for desireable traits essentially willing to become hired wombs. 300 would be the bare minimum, assuming each gives birth to 3 babies at least.
5. Lots of money and infrastructure to provide our mothers and their altered offspring with standardized living environment, nutrition and education

Again, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, embryonic selection, by itself, can go a long way if you harvest/fertilise enough gametes to work with, and if you know what genes to select for. That doesn't require active gene modification. What it does require is a comprehensive knowledge of how various genes express themselves, which will require large-scale statistical surveys of extant populations to figure out. That will take time, probably decades, but it is going to happen.

Finding volunteers is not going to be a problem, given the number of US parents willing to select for their child's gender. I'm not sure a completely standardised environment is essential though, as long as you can compare against the baseline for socioeconomic background.

.

[warty goblin]

Excuse me, but average income (or quality of life) is entirely likely to go up in meaningful terms, because IQ increases the efficiency with which a wide variety of economic functions can be performed. Stock analysts tend to have higher IQ not because they picked that criterion out of a hat, but because candidates with higher IQ tend to pick better stocks. Successful artists and composers tend to have well-above average IQs, even if this kind of cognitive faculty is tough to measure, probably because G-factor feeds into spatial and auditory processing. Kids with higher IQ go further in education because they absorb and retain information more easily, and with less supervision.

Most economic functions that cannot be trivially automated benefit to some degree or another from analytic or creative problem-solving. In which case problem-solving ability can always be of absolute social benefit, not just a relative individual advantage. (Even if that social benefit was more free time, rather than more goods/services.)

I'm going to guess you've never really worked in, say,a restaurant before. Being smart, at least in the academic sense, doesn't really help that much. Best dishwasher I've ever met had an IQ of maybe 90.

Now, sure, the toilets will still have to be scrubbed. But unlike today, where a significant minority of people basically have few other job prospects, in a world where all the janitors could just as easily be doctors or software architects, they will at least be heavily compensated for their trouble. Or, heck, maybe invent robots to do it.

This isn't how compensation works. You get paid as some combination of how much revenue you bring in, and how hard you are to replace. Scrubbing toilets won't generate more money for the toilet owners just because smarter people are doing the scrubbing.

[Carry2]

I'm going to guess you've never really worked in, say,a restaurant before. Being smart, at least in the academic sense, doesn't really help that much. Best dishwasher I've ever met had an IQ of maybe 90.

What proportion of a developed nations' GDP is based on dishwashing, exactly? Because the best dishwasher I met was a robot.

This isn't how compensation works. You get paid as some combination of how much revenue you bring in, and how hard you are to replace.

When everybody can perform a job that they enjoy more, there isn't going to be anyone else that you can easily persuade to fill the vacancy when you leave. Janitors will not be easy to replace, unless you pay them appropriately. And the revenue they bring in will be based on how desperately people want their toilets scrubbed.

[warty goblin]

What proportion of a developed nations' GDP is based on dishwashing, exactly? Because the best dishwasher I met was a robot.

I've run those. They take a lot of work, most of the commercial ones I've used can't really be trusted to anything actually clean for one thing. You're pretty much always better off handscrubbing anything dirtier than a waterglass. The machine is just there as a glorified rinsing devise/sterilizer/health service requirement.

When everybody can perform a job that they enjoy more, there isn't going to be anyone else that you can easily persuade to fill the vacancy when you leave. Janitors will not be easy to replace, unless you pay them appropriately. And the revenue they bring in will be based on how desperately people want their toilets scrubbed.

No.

People need jobs. The companies that provide those jobs only need so many people for any given area. In most fields it's not that companies can't hire more people, it's that they don't want to. Generally they want to do the opposite as much as possible. Raising the number of expensive to employ smart people - and somehow also getting everyone the training they need to perform a 'better' job - doesn't mean the world suddenly has jobs for them. The existence of another fifty people with Ph.D.s in whateverology doesn't mean anybody needs them. Just check out the job market for history Ph.D.s for case in point.

Meanwhile, the toilets still need scrubbed, and there's loans to pay back. I'm not speculating here, this is already happening. . Better a bad job than no job.

[Ravens_cry]

Yes, a detail all too often forgotten in many Utopian dreams; who's running the store?

[Carry2]

...Meanwhile, the toilets still need scrubbed, and there's loans to pay back. I'm not speculating here, this is already happening. . Better a bad job than no job.

I cannot claim to have any particularly expert understanding of the economic factors underlying our present-day global recession (aside from the large role apparently played by both idiots and psychopaths, which is reason enough to start looking hard at what we can do to identify those.)

However, my general impression was that increases in efficiency should translate to lower prices for consumers and/or increases in leisure time, and that the former should translate into increased consumer spending in other sectors of the economy, thereby stimulating employment in those sectors. This idea that economies only contain a fixed number of jobs seems to fly in the face of prior historical trends, which saw a gradual transition away from the bulk of the population being employed as farmers and unskilled labourers toward manufacturing and retail, and more recently from those jobs towards IT and entertainment.

Of course, this transition assumes that (A) employers are in genuine competition with eachother, so that prices do go down and savings are passed on to the consumer, and (B) the workforce can be retrained to perform more skill-intensive jobs. It's possible that we should be doing what Bertrand Russell suggested decades ago- instead of seeking to raise incomes, we might start focusing on increased leisure time instead.


(Moreover, this argument would seem to imply that investment in education is equally futile. If history PHDs do not guarantee employment, does this become an argument for not funding college courses? And if Dishwashing machines are neither more efficient or cost-effective, why on earth do people buy them?)

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[Terraoblivion]

So you're making bold, sweeping statements about how human society will develop in the future including about economic concerns while also saying that you know nothing about economics. Doesn't that strike you as a bit...unwise, not to mention as an indication that maybe others know more about the topic than you.

[warty goblin]

I cannot claim to have any particularly expert understanding of the economic factors underlying our present-day global recession (aside from the large role apparently played by both idiots and psychopaths, which is reason enough to start looking hard at what we can do to identify those.)

However, my general impression was that increases in efficiency should translate to lower prices for consumers and/or increases in leisure time, and that the former should translate into increased consumer spending in other sectors of the economy, thereby stimulating employment in those sectors. This idea that economies only contain a fixed number of jobs seems to fly in the face of prior historical trends, which saw a gradual transition away from the bulk of the population being employed as farmers and unskilled labourers toward manufacturing and retail, and more recently from those jobs towards IT and entertainment.

Increasing efficiency also decreases the number of employees a company requires to function. That means that companies can, for most jobs, get away with paying less. Which is pretty much what the US has seen in the last thirty or so years; a virtual freeze in actual income growth for most households. Since the minimum wage hasn't been increased nationally for quite a while now (some states have done so on their own), there's a lot of jobs that, after adjusting for inflation, pay less now than they did five or ten years ago.

Speaking anecdotally, I spent about three years working in various restaurants. First in dishroom, then as a cook. My starting wage was $8.25 an hour. At one point it got up to $8.50. By the time I got out of food service and into grad school, it was down to $8.00/hour.

(Moreover, this argument would seem to imply that investment in education is equally futile. If history PHDs do not guarantee employment, does this become an argument for not funding college courses? And if Dishwashing machines are neither more efficient or cost-effective, why on earth do people buy them?)

No, it implies that educating everybody won't somehow turn the economy into a utopic paradise where janitors pull down 80k a year. They'll still get paid crap, only since everybody has a degree I'd expect a lot of currently better paying jobs to start paying less.

It can be be worth investing in educating some of the population, without that implying it's worthwhile to get everybody a bachelor's. The return on investment here might just be negative quadratic, or otherwise concave in nature.

People* buy dishwashing machines because they're essentially mandated by health code, and for certain very low-filth sorts of washing up, do save time. For serious grunge - anything above water glasses in my experience - it's still all about people with steel wool and high pressure hoses. I recall working dishroom during a local festival a couple years ago. I pulled an eight plus hour shifts two nights in a row without any breaks and scrubbed so many plates my knuckles started to bleed.

*There's also the bit where what your average restaurant owner knows about running a kitchen wouldn't tax a brighter than average mosquito. About the best one could hope for was enough casual neglect that the people who actually knew what they were doing could get on with things.

[Carry2]

Increasing efficiency also decreases the number of employees a company requires to function...

Which means, assuming normal forces of market competition, that their costs will drop, which means that their prices will drop, which means more money in the hands of consumers, which means that consumer spending in other market sectors increases, which means that employment in those sectors rises. This is a trend that has been observed historically for several centuries.

If, for some strange reason, people stop spending their money, you could petition for government mandates to reduce working hours instead. If those mandates are absent, or if other social policies are required to break up market monopolies that fail to pass on savings or redistribute top earners' wealth more fairly, then by all means petition for those. But increases in efficiency per se are not your enemy here.

This is to say nothing of the public savings that should result from lower costs in healthcare (since fewer people would get sick), education and retraining (since people would learn faster with less supervision,) and policing (since predispositions toward violence, mental illness or sociopathy would be less common.)

They'll still get paid crap, only since everybody has a degree I'd expect a lot of currently better paying jobs to start paying less...

Excuse me, but if wealth levels were purely relative, wouldn't everybody else being paid less be equivalent to janitors being paid more?

I mean, this is a little like someone saying 200 years ago that "people will still have to go down the coal mines." Yeah, they do still have to, the difference being that nowadays, thanks to increased opportunity for social mobility and better automated machinery, coal miners get adequately compensated for the dangers involved and the job is less onerous to begin with.

People* buy dishwashing machines because they're essentially mandated by health code, and for certain very low-filth sorts of washing up, do save time...

I don't recall that the health code made my house buy a dishwasher.

[Carry2]

So you're making bold, sweeping statements about how human society will develop in the future including about economic concerns while also saying that you know nothing about economics. Doesn't that strike you as a bit...unwise, not to mention as an indication that maybe others know more about the topic than you.

Terra, I apologise if I have come across as being overly venturesome in my analysis, particularly over the last page or two. I should acknowledge that there are many uncertainties involved in trying to forecast long-term economic, demographic or technological trends.

But this is a non-argument that we've already visited. If others know more about the subject, the onus is on them to present the facts and logic that their expertise should furnish. And even if the appeal to authority were valid, there are any number of authorities in various scientific fields who have been busy outlining similar scenarios. Go ask Michio Kaku. Heck, some of these authorities wind up envisioning totally different things, so who am I supposed to defer to? And how are we supposed to select for the favourable outcomes when we don't know what to aim for?

On the specific subject of economic side-effects, my limited understanding of the current recession is largely based on news reports and popular literature. And while that doesn't make me an expert, the overall impression I get is that significant numbers of people- at both ends of the economic spectrum- either didn't know about the mess they were creating, which is idiotic, or didn't care, which is sociopathic. And without dismissing the importance of procedural institutions, culture and education in ameliorating those evils*, any intervention- whether environmental or genetic- which might reduce the incidence of such behaviours also merits thorough investigation.

*Something I am fond of pointing out when it comes to playing RPGs, where people are prone to saying "System doesn't matter, you just have to find the right people". This viewpoint is incorrect, and so I feel compelled to point out that natural predispositions are only half the story, for the same reason that I feel compelled to argue with people who think that environment is everything. I'm not an active contrarian, I just don't see the point to contributing redundant information.

[Carry2]

RE a futuristic but not that farfetched thing:
Google Glass + Gesture Interface + Mental Interface + AR MMORPG = ???

Interesting. Speaking of impending developments, I may have overestimated the arrival date for post-silicon computation. (And possibly VR.)