As of July 30, GiveWell considers the International Council for the Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders Global Network (ICCIDD) a contender for their 2014 recommendation, according to their ongoing review. They also mention that they're considering the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), which they've had their eye on for a few years. They describe some remaining uncertainties -- this has been a major philanthropic success for the past couple decades, so why is there a funding gap now, well before the work is finished? Is it some sort of donor fatigue, or are the remaining countries that need iodization harder to work in, or is it something else?

(Also, average gains from intervention seem to be more like 3-4 IQ points.)

My guess: different causes of the Flynn effect dominated at different times (and maybe in different places, too).

For instance, Richard Lynn argued in 1990 that nutrition was the main explanation of the Flynn effect, but Flynn has recently counterargued that nutrition is unlikely to have contributed much since 1950 or so.

Another example. Rick Nevin reckons decreasing lead exposure for children has made all the difference, but when I did my own back-of-the-envelope calculations using NHANES data for teenagers from the late 1970s to 2010, it looked like lead probably had a big impact between the late 1970s and early 1990s (maybe 5 IQ points, as average lead levels sank from ~10μg/dL to ~2μg/dL), but not since then, because blood lead concentrations had fallen so low that further improvement (down to ~1μg/dL) made little difference to IQ.

Shrinking families would likely be a third factor along these lines, maybe kicking in hardest in mid-century, bolstering IQs after nutrition fell away as a key factor but before declining lead exposure made much difference.

Edit, November 27: fixing the Richard Lynn paper link.

Reading Steve Wozniaks biography iWoz I support your view that parents nowadays focus more on education in youngest years. Steve learned about electronic components even before he was four years old. His father explained to him many things about electronics before he was old enough for school. He learned to read at the age of three. This needs parents who assist. Steve Wozniak praised his father for explaining always on a level he could understand. Only one step at a time.

His exceptional high intelligence, he cited a test IQ > 200, is for sure not only inherited but consequence of loving care, teaching and challenging by his parents and peers.

Looks good to me, with the same set of caveats as the original claim. Though note that both arguments are bolstered if "improvement of people" or "design of machines" in the second sentence is replaced by a more exhaustive inventory. Would be good to think more about the differences.

For me, it "works" similarly to the original, but emphasizes (1) the underspecification of "far surpass", and (2) that the creation of a greater intelligence may require resources (intellectual or otherwise) beyond those of the proposed ultraintelligent person, the way an ultraintelligent wasp may qualify as far superior in all intellectual endeavors to a typical wasp yet still remain unable to invent and build a simple computing machine, nevermind constructing a greater intelligence.

Organizations can become much more superintelligent than they are. A team of humans plus better and better weak AI has no upper limit to intelligence. Such a hybrid superintelligent organization can be the way to keep AI development under control.

Do you think AI experts deserve their notoriety at predicting? The several public predictions that I know of prior to 1980 were indeed early (i.e. we have passed the time they predicted) but [Michie's survey] covers about ten times as many people and suggests that in the 70s, most CS researchers thought human-level AI would not arrive by 2014.

My motivation for asking that question is that, since extreme biological cognitive enhancement could reduce existential risk and other problems by creating people smart enough to be able to solve them

Smarter people can also come up with more dangerous ideas so it's not clear that existential risk get's lowered.

How efficiently can money and research be turned into faster development of biological cognitive enhancement techniques such as iterated embryo selection?

I think there already plenty of money invested into that field. Agriculture wants to be able to effectively clone animals and insert new genes. Various scientists also want to be able to change genes of organisms effectively without having to wait years till your mouse get's children.

Getting information information about what genes do largely depends on cheap sequencing and there a lot of money invested into getting more efficient gene sequencing.

It might be more a problem of public perception, because at the end of the day people have to be willing to use these technologies. Whichever group funds embryo selection will be denounced by many other groups, so it may be wise to find a source of funding that is difficult to criticise.

One problem is that for that approach, you would need, say, standardized IQ tests and genomes for a large number of people, and then to identify genome properties correlated with high IQ.

First, all biologists everywhere are still obsessed with "one gene" answers. Even when they use big-data tools, they use them to come up with lists of genes, each of which they say has a measurable independent contribution to whatever it is they're studying. This is looking for your keys under the lamppost. The effect of one gene allele depends on what alleles of other genes are present. But try to find anything in the literature acknowledging that. (Admittedly we have probably evolved for high independence of genes, so that we can reproduce thru sex.)

Second, as soon as you start identifying genome properties associated with IQ, you'll get accused of racism.

This is also one of points where I dont agree with Bostrom's (fantastic!) book.

We could use analogy from history: human-animal = soldier+hourse didnt need the physical iterface (like in Avatar movie) and still added awesome military advance.

Something similar we could get from better weak AI tools. (probably with better GUI - but it is not only about GUI)

"Tools" dont need to have big general intelligence. They could be at hourse level:

• their incredible power of analyse big structure (big memory buffer)
• speed of "rider" using quick "computation" with "tether" at your hands

One proposal goes that one measures predictive/reward-seeking ability on random small Turing machines: http://lesswrong.com/lw/42t/aixistyle_iq_tests/

Below you ask whether the definition of intelligence per se is important at all; it seems it's not, and this may be some indication of how to measure what you actually care about.

Maybe a good starting point would be IQ tests?

Survival was and is the challenge of evolution. Higher intelligence gives more options to cope with deadly dangers.

To measure intelligence we should challenge AI entities using standardized tests. To develop these tests will become a new field of research. IQ tests are not suitable because of their anthropocentrism. Tests should analyze capabilities how good and fast real world problems are solved.

With diet, modafinil, etc this might already be the case. Sugar alone makes it more difficult to concentrate for many people, as well as having many other deleterious effects. Yet all many people do is say "you can have your chocolate, but only after you take your ritalin"

A lot of negative-sum selection for height perhaps. The genetic architecture is already known well enough for major embryo selection, and the rest is coming quickly.

Height's contribution to CEO status is perhaps half of IQ's, and in addition to substantial effects on income it is also very helpful in the marriage market for men.

But many of the benefits are likely positional, reflecting the social status gains of being taller than others in one's social environment, and there are physiological costs (as well as use of selective power that could be used on health, cognition, and other less positional goods).

Choices at actual sperm banks suggests parents would use a mix that placed serious non-exclusive weight on each of height, attractiveness, health, education/intelligence, and anything contributing to professional success. Selection on personality might be for traits that improve individual success or for compatibility with parents, but I'm not sure about the net.

Selection for similarity on political and religious orientation might come into use, and could have disturbing and important consequences.

Presumably many other traits would be selected for as well. Increasing intelligence has knee-jerk comparisons to eugenics & racism, so perhaps physical attractiveness/fitness would be selected for more strongly. Since personality traits are partially genetic, these may be selected for too. Homosexuality is partially genetic, so many gay rights movements would move to ban embryo selection (although some people would want bi kids because they don't want to deprive their kids of any options in life). Sexuality is correlated with other personality traits, so whatever choices are made will have knock-on effects. Some would advocate selecting against negative traits such as schizophrenia, ADHD and violence. Unfortunately, these traits are thought to provide an advantage in certain situations, or in combination with other genes, so we might also lose the creatively that comes with subclinical psychosis (poets are 20x more likely to go insane than average), the beneficial novel behaviour that comes with ADHD, and the ability to stand up for yourself (if aggression correlates with assertiveness). I know one should not generalise from fictional evidence, but it reminds me of the film 'demolition man' where society has evolved to a point where there is no violence, so when a murderer awakes from cryonic suspension they cannot defend themselves. Far better film than Gattaca.

Yvain has a biodeterministic guide to parenting. Some people would do the same things: http://squid314.livejournal.com/346391.html

Gattaca, except everyone is actually superhuman and nobody cares about whether you'll have a heart attack at thirty except your doctor.

Is intelligence really a single dimension?

Related: Do we see a strong clustering of strategies that work across all the domains we have encountered so far? I see the answer to original question being yes if there is just one large cluster, and no if it turns out there are many fairly orthogonal clusters.

Is robustness against corner cases (idiosyncratic domains) a very important parameter? We certainly treat it as such in our construction of least convenient worlds to break decision theories.

We have to assume only that we will not significantly improve our understanding of what intelligence is without attempting to create it (through reverse engineering, coding, or EMs). If our understanding remains incipient the safe policy is to assume that indeed intelligence is a capacity, or set of capacities that can be used to bootstrap itself. Given the 10¨52 lives at stake, even if we were fairly confident intelligence cannot bootstrap, we should still MaxiPok and act as if it was.

Single-metric versions of intelligence are going the way of the dinosaur. In practical contexts, it's much better to test for a bunch of specific skills and aptitudes and to create a predictive model of success at the desired task.

In addition, our understanding of intelligence frequently gives a high score to someone capable of making terrible decisions or someone reasoning brilliantly from a set of desperately flawed first principles.

you would create a social nightmare politically and socially. The less interference in the political process [but never without consultation] the clearer the outcome. Total social input would become grey noise. The lowest common denominator would win. Populist politics is bad enough as it is. Representative democracy on the Scandinavian-Swiss model is credible as a system that seems to steer away from any form of extremism.

Unexpected advances in physics lead to super-exponential increases in computing power (such as were expected from quantum computing), allowing brute-force algorithms or a simulated ecosystem to achieve super-intelligence.

Real-time implanted or worn sensors plus genomics, physiology simulation, and massive on-line collaboration enables people to identify the self-improvement techniques that are useful to them.

Someone uses ancient DNA to make a Neanderthal, and it turns out they died out because their superhuman intelligence was too metabolically expensive.

Reading all of LessWrong in a single sitting.

It seems like the characterization of outcomes into distinct "routes" is likely to be fraught; even if such a breakdown was in some sense exhaustive I would not be surprised if actual developments didn't really fit into the proposed framework. For example, there is a complicated and hard to divide space between AI, improved tools, brain-computer interfaces, better institutions, and better training. I expect that ex post the whole thing will look like a bit of a mess.

One practical result is that even if there is a strong deductive argument for X given "We achieve superintelligence along route Y" for every particular Y in Bostrom's list, I would not take this as particularly strong evidence for X. I would instead view it as having considered a few random scenarios where X is true, and weighing this up alongside other kinds of evidence.

Besides the one's with extremely low likelihood (being handed SI by the simulators of our universe, or aliens find it first.) However this may be an artifice of Bostrom's construction. If you partition the space of possible progress in a way where one of the categories captures "non of the above", then it only seems as if the area has been searched.

Shulman & Bostrom (2014) make a nice point about this:

The history of IVF... suggests that applications which were opposed in anticipation can rapidly become accepted when they become live options.

As table 2 in the paper shows, the American public generally opposed IVF until the first IVF baby was born, and then they were in favor of it.

As of 2004, only 28% of Americans approve of embryo selection for improving strength or intelligence, but that could change rapidly when the technology is available.

Remember that effect where you read a newspaper and mostly trust what it says, at least until one of the stories is about a subject you have expertise in, and then you notice that it's completely full of errors? It makes it very difficult to trust the newspaper on any subject after that. I started Bostrom's book very skeptical of how well he would be handling the material, since it covers many different fields of expertise that he cannot hope to have mastered.

My personal field of expertise is BCI. I did my doctoral work in that field, 2006-2011. I endorse every word that Bostrom wrote on BCI in the book. And consequently, in the opposite of the newspaper effect, I dramatically raised my confidence that Bostrom has accurately characterized the subjects I'm more ignorant of.

How close we are to making genetic enhancement work in a big way. I'm not fully convinced of the magnitudes of gains from iterated embryo selection as projected by Bostrom; but even being able to drag the average level of genetically-determined intelligence up close to the current maxima of the distribution would be immensely helpful, and it's informative that Bostrom suggests we'll have the means within a few decades.

YES. AI under present knowledge systems wont deliver the promise of real live intelligence. And the author[s] get bogged in computational details that delay detract for greater efficiency in the cognitive field. Still it's a rippa of a project. Given how hopeless humans are globally machine logic might offer real time solutions such as less humans to start off with. Would solve heaps of other problems we have and are creating.

The first few generations would test distinct traits. However states would have a strong incentive to increase intelligence. Diligence or conscientiousness may be even more important, since it gets more things done.

Some parents will use a selection option as soon as any is available. To get a child genius like Einstein is attractive to these strange people. First 'selections' will be based on semi-knowledge. Descending childs will suffer from many unintended side effects.

Unless we do not fully understand how intelligence and 'hard wired' cognitive features are coded in DNA and epigenetic activation patterns we should not start any selection. Many countries have laws prohibiting embryo selection but this barrier seems to weaken recently. We should not tear it down unless we are precisely knowing what we are going to do.

It may be possible to decode the encoding used in different brains. Representations in particular sensory modalities are localized to a few square inches of cortex.

I think it's probably enough of an obstacle that it's more likely an AGI will be developed first. In that sense I do agree with Bostrom. However, I wouldn't say it's completely infeasible, rather that it will require considerable advances in pattern recognition technology, our understanding of the brain, and our technological ability to interface with the brain first. The idiosyncratic morphology and distributed/non-localized information storage make for a very difficult engineering problem, but I'm optimistic that it can be overcome in some way or another.

We've already had some (granted, very limited) success with decoding imagery from the visual cortex through "dumb" (non-AGI) machine learning algorithms, which makes deeper interaction seem at least possible. If we can make advances in the above-mentioned fields, I would guess the biggest limitation will be that we'll never have a standardized "plug'n'play" protocol for brains--interfaces will require specialized tuning for each individual and a learning period during which the algorithms can "figure out" how your brain is wired up.

The visual cortex can handle huge amounts of data input, but the amount of data one can output by typing/writing/drawing is orders of magnitude lower, suggesting that data output is the lower-hanging fruit for BCI.

Two datapoints: I find reading and typing faster to both be very useful, suggesting my brain is not bottlenecked in its capacity to understand things at my natural rate of reading or typing.

I'll have to weigh in wiith Botrom on this one, though I think it depends a lot on the individual brain-mind, i.e., how your particular personality crunches the data.

Some people are "information consumers", others are "information producers". I think Einstein might have used the obvious terms supercritical vs subcritical minds at some point -- terms that in any case (einstein or not) naturally occurred to me (and probably lots of people) and I've used since teenager years, just in talking to my friends, to describe different people's mental processes.

The issue of course is (a) to what extent you use incoming ideas as "data" to spark new trains of thought, plus (b) how many interconnections you notice between various ideas and theories -- and as a multiplier of (b), how abstract these resonances and interconnections are (hugely increasing the perceived potential interconnection space.)

For me, if the world would stop in place, and I had an arbitrary lifespan, I could easily spend the next 50 years (at least) mining the material I have already acquired, generating new ideas, extensions, cross connections. (I sometimes almost wish it would, in some parallel world, so I could properly metabolize what I have, which I think at times I am only scratching the surface of.)

Of course it depends on the kind of material, as well. If one is reading an undergrad physics textbook in college, it is pretty much finite: if you understand the presentation and the development as you read, you can think for an extra 10 or 15 minutes about all the way it applies to the world, and pretty much have it. Thinking of further "applications" pretty much add no value, additional insight, or interest.

But with other material, esp in fields that are divergent and full of questions that are not settled yet, I find myself reading a few paragraphs, and it sparks so many new trains of thought, I feel flooded and have a hard time continuing the reading -- and feel like I have to get up and go walk for an hour. Sometimes I feel like acquiring new ideas is exponentially increasing my processing load, not linearly, and I could spend a lifetime investigating the offshoots that suggest themselves.

These arguments have been made by quite a few authors over the years at the Edge question. The most robust prediction is that we won't defeat evolution in energy efficiency to absorb content. We will not create machine interfaces so good that they beat our sense organs.

Ramez Naam wrote two Sci-Fi novels on that issue: Nexus and Crux. Drinking a silvery liquid of communicative nanobots is enough. The bots autonomously find their way into the brain and connect to neural cells.

Regarding non-invasiveness this vision might get acceptance. Unsolved technical issues are: building such nano bots, supplying energy and dynamic long range communication. I fully agree with Bostrums scepticism.

Low social acceptance of Google glass shows that humans with brain interconnection might face similar repercussions. Via BCI you could 'videotape' what you see with your eyes. A BCI will probably not be so easy deactivated than switching off your Google glass.

Iterated embryo selection was pretty interesting. I wonder if there is anything viable about inserting new / activating the growth of neurons / synapses into the human brain, particularly into specifically targeted areas, like the section(s) where people do math.

I am a big Bostrom fan, but I am not sure why brain-computer interfaces were downgraded so much in this chapter.

The text seems to overestimate the risks of brain implants today. Given another twenty or more years to work out the issues, these risks will fall even more.

It also seems to underestimate the benefits of some rather boring upgrades. Having a direct link to several ordinary software tools like MS Excel would make us a lot more intelligent. We would also gain a lot of ability by being able to directly control machinery.

Just having the equivalent of the Notepad application in there would permit me to ace many tests, remember people's names and stop forgetting where I parked my car and how many calories I've eaten today.

Embryo selection for intelligence might easily lead to autism and other psychological defects. A single failed trial will cost millions if life long full care has to be provided for this poor human being.