Even the brightest geniuses don't really start having much of an impact on a field until about 20. And it takes further time for ideas to spread, so perhaps they'd need to reach the age of 30.

We could probably create humans vastly smarter than have ever previously existed with full genome synthesis, who could have a huge impact at a much younger age. But otherwise I agree.

Another short-term technology not even mentioned on your list is gamete sequencing. Sperm and eggs are produced in groups of four, with two complementary pairs per stem cell. If we could figure out how to get a good enough read from three of those cells, we could infer the genome of the fourth and pair up the best sperm and egg. That would naively allow us to double the gain, so 24 points.

Wouldn't it be a factor of sqrt(2), not double?

There are other technologies like in-vitro oogenesis that could raise the gain by perhaps 50% (assuming we could produce a couple of thousand embryos). And there are groups that are working on that right now.

That sounds fairly promising and worth looking into.

I don't think genome synthesis is likely to be possible in time. CRISPR or some other editing technique might work in the next 10 years, but the public seems to be much less comfortable with editing as opposed to selection, so that might be more politically difficult.

Agreed, which makes my previous point somewhat moot. I'm tempted to say we should at least keep synthesis in the back of our minds in case the problems on the critical path end up being easier than expected.

Lastly, even if we could create such a predictor, what weirdo parents would select for "likely to work on x-risk-reduction"? The parents themselves would have to be convinced that x-risk is a problem, so it's a somewhat circular solution.

Alignment-problem-aware people could be early adopters of embryo-selection-for-G. There are lots of smart alignment-problem-aware people who read this forum and may be open to this idea, so it's not necessarily circular.

I am very nervous about any solutions which require the government to enforce selection for certain traits.

I think it's super unlikely we'd be able to get this sort of large scale coordination anyways.

The only strategy that seems viable to me is enhanced intelligence + changing the memetic environment. I don't think genetics is going to provide a substitute for the work that has to be done by us stone-brainers to convince more people that misaligned AI is a serious threat.

I don't think large scale awareness is necessary (see my above point). Even if you could do it, pushing for large scale awareness could backfire by drawing the wrong sort of attention (e.g. by resulting in public outrage about selection-for-G so politicians move to ban it). Though I admittedly don't place much confidence in my current ability to gauge the likelihood of this sort of thing. More awareness of the alignment problem is probably good.

I am also optimistic that more intelligent people would better grasp the arguments about AI safety and other sources of X-risk. There's also some research about intelligent people's disproportionate tendency to support enforcement of rules encouraging positive-sum cooperation that I wrote about in my first post on genetic engineering [LW · GW], so I can see this potentially helping with the coordination aspects of AI and other fields.

Agreed, society wide gains in G would likely have the general effect of raising the sanity waterline [LW · GW].

Anyhow, I've updated slightly towards focusing more on thinking about near-term embryo selection strategies as a result of reading and responding to this.

(Edited because I don't think my original terse reply made my thoughts on this very clear)

If we're in a (very) long timeline world, I suspect the default thing that ends up happening is that embryo selection is gradually adopted, and G slowly rises population-wide. The reason timelines are long in such a world is that AGI ended up being way harder than it currently looks, so the gradually rising G levels would indeed increase the probability that unaligned AGI is created, unless this somewhat-higher-G world also manages to get large scale coordination right (don't hold your breath). Alignment research would directly benefit from more capable researchers, and would probably benefit from far greater public awareness than it currently receives (due to generally higher sanity and also just more time for the ideas to percolate into the mainstream), which in turn means far more researchers working on it. People in alignment-aware communities would likely be early adopters of embryo selection, which could give alignment a head start (this is one strategy we might wish to consider: the point of my post was to get us to start thinking about these sorts of strategies).

If we're only in a medium~longish timeline world (AGI in the latter half of this century, say) then there won't be enough time for this sort of large scale adoption: a quick G boosting intervention would be used by a small group of early-adopters long before it catches on more broadly. So, strategically, we'd want to be thinking about making sure that the "small group of early-adopters" is alignment-aware.

He Jiankui had issues beyond just doing something bioethically controversial. He didn't make the intended edits cleanly in any embryo (instead there were issues with off-target edits and mosaicism). If I remember correctly, he also misled the parents about the nature of the intervention.

All in all, if you look into the details of what he did, he doesn't come out looking good from any perspective.

Good point, I didn't address this at all in the post. Germline editing is indeed outside the current Overton window. One thing I'm curious about is whether there are any shreds of hope that we might be able to accelerate any of the relevant technical research: one thing this implies is not specifically focusing on the use case of enhancement, to avoid attracting condemnation (which would risk slowing existing research due to e.g. new regulations being levied).

For some techniques this seems harder than for others: iterated embryo selection is pretty clearly meant for enhancement (which could also mean animal enhancement, i.e. efficient livestock breeding). The Cas9 stuff has lots of potential uses, so it's currently being heavily pursued despite norms. There's also lots of ongoing work on the synthesis of simple genomes (e.g. for bacteria), with many companies offering synthesis services. Of course, the problems I identified as likely being on the critical path to creating modal human genomes are pretty enhancement specific (again, the only other application that comes to mind is making better livestock) which is unfortunate, given the massive (and quick!) upside of this approach if you can get it to work.