Genetically Engineered Intelligence

Folks at the Singularity Institute have been watching the reproductive biotechnology area for quite a while, e.g. it plays a significant role in the Uncertain Future modeling app. Some relevant points:

1. Embryo selection technology (which is the only existing way to apply genetic findings on IQ) on its own has limited impact: if you produce a hundred embryos and have a perfect predictive model of intelligence, you could get a boost of perhaps a standard deviation for a typical couple. You can already get this benefit by using donor sperm and eggs, if one is willing to have genetically unrelated kids, and China doesn't seem to have strongly encouraged doing so. Eggs from elite donor females are also scarce.

2. It gets much more powerful with the technology for artificial gametes, which let you make numerous embryos, boost the supply of eggs that can be obtained from a given elite donor to meet demand, and have multiple generations in vitro (create many embryos, cultivate artifical gametes from the best combinations, and repeatedly cross them to get what would otherwise take hundreds of years in only one). Artificial gametes are a pretty natural extension of stem cell technology, but people talk about having them in ten years, not the next couple years (when genomics will get to the point of plumbing the genetic architecture of intelligence and other traits conducive to scientific progress).

3. The expected combination of behavioral genomics and improvements in artificial gametes or genetic engineering technology makes the idea of lasting stagnation or social collapse look less plausible, and concentrates more of the probability mass for AI and WBE in this century than otherwise.

4. The increase of intelligence relative to other inputs in the scientific process makes it more likely that scientists and developers will see and respond wisely to risks, making it more plausible that AI development will proceed safely.

5. The effect of smarter political leadership will be attenuated and delayed: it takes time to rise to high positions.

6. Mass improvements of the electorate/selectorate will be even slower, as it will take a number of decades for enhanced kids to approach a majority, especially given likely limited adoption (even with big subsidies and measures like relaxation of the one-child policy for enhanced kids).

7. The potential gains from enhancement are much larger for those willing to have children genetically unrelated to them, or regions which encourage this.

8. Those working to reduce existential risk should shift intellectual effort at the margin to projects that are time-sensitive (e.g. the chance that AI or engineered extinction plagues will be easy to produce sooner than generally thought) and expect future enhanced folk to do more of the cognitive heavy lifting.

9. Efforts to transmit relevant information and values to young people/the next generation will become more important in the next 20 years or so. Ensuring that enhanced kids are exposed to ideas that encourage them to reduce existential risk as they grow up looks more important. It would be good to have a clear and accessible picture of the risks landscape available by then.

10. Encouraging somewhat faster and more evenly distributed adoption of the enhancement technologies looks desirable. In Western countries, this means relaxing or avoiding restrictive regulations, spreading pro-enhancement memes, and the development of the personal genomics industry (companies like 23andme or Counsyl).

11. At any given time, there will be a 15-20 year lag between the ability distribution of enhanced young adults who have begun to contribute to research and economic growth and the distribution of newborns with the very latest enhancements. This looks like something that will boost growth substantially, but the big recursive effects look like they won't have time to come into play until the second half of the century.

12. Genomics studies of intelligence may lead to the development of cognitive enhancement drugs on a faster timescale (although testing and approval still takes close to a decade, that's less than growth to maturity). This is less certain (genetic variation affecting intelligence may mostly be rare idiosyncratic stuff, or only relevant in maturation and early brain development), but could be applied to a much larger population of existing adults, and children born without genetic enhancement.

13. Complete Genomics originally claimed they would sequence 10,000 genomes in 2010. In the article you linked to, they gave delays in establishing their main sequencing facility as a reason for promising only 5,000 for 2010. According to their wikipedia article, they only wound up sequencing 300 genomes in the third quarter of 2010. The hype in this area is usually one or two years premature (although that's an amazingly short hype cycle nonetheless!), even with order of magnitude annual growth in sequencing.

我，作为个人来说，欢迎我们新的汉统治者。

See my 2007 article A Thousand Chinese Einsteins Every Year

What do people think are the odds that we'll find specific genes that are markers for IQ?

(I assume that, just like with cancer, genes are "risk factors", not on-off switches, and how they're expressed depends somewhat on environment and behavior. But the equivalent of BRCA for IQ would still be really important.)

I'm by no means an expert but I have studied a lot of the relevant fields to this topic in college. I know this thread is long dead but since it came up on the front page of google search of the title I feel the need to give my input. I was really into AI and studied computer science in college until I found out that Moore's law is going to hit the atomic barrier before we have enough hardware by reasonable estimates to simulate a brain and there is no clear way to move forward (neither parallel programming nor quantum computing looks like it will save the dream without major breakthroughs that are by no means guaranteed to come within our lifetimes). The situation looks bad to anyone with a skeptical mind.

The same cannot be said of this genetically engineered intelligence idea. I switched to molecular biology and after two years of study it still seems just as possible especially given that in 2009 gene therapy was successfully used to introduce new genes into a genome to cure colorblindness in monkeys and a fatal brain disease in two human boys. Since you're basically inserting a new gene into a random place in the genome, there's always a chance you'll insert into a cancer gene. That's the bad news. The good news is that it works and can be done on adults. I would certainly volunteer for it if I was terminally ill. Also the cancer thing has a lot of conceivable solutions.

You mentioned recursive feedback. This is unlikely. While it is easy to find genes for intelligence that are already in the gene pool, inventing new ones is a whole 'nother ballgame. Not only would it require understanding the mind, it would also require us to invent new enzymatic proteins which, last time I checked, is still a computationally intractable problem. There is definitely a ceiling there that is likely unbreakable even by the first generation of superhuman geniuses. The good news is how potentially genius this first generation of engineered humans would be. It's estimated that there at least hundreds of genes influencing intelligence each with multiple alleles. Notice how even 2^100 dwarfs the number of humans that have ever lived? You can safely bet that no optimal human in terms of intelligence has ever been born.

Even if you don't buy this argument, citing that intelligence genes are simply additive and interact in such a complex manner that even China's statisticians armed with supercomputers can't find the optimal genome, you'd still have to concede that the current smartest humans are amazing beings that outperform the average or even the highly intelligent in remarkably profound ways.

In short, what you suggest can be done right now on adults in a highly sloppy and risky manner with some of the IQ genes we've already found and it's efficacy would be highly variable, depending on the extent to which the gene's influence is developmental.

Thanks for making this interesting and potentially important post! I got a lot out of Carl Shulman's comment as well.

The ramifications are likely to be pretty negligible. Genetic engineering of the human genome is a difficult and slow process - and machine intelligence will likely zoom past human intelligence without genetic engineering of humans making very much difference.

To improve effective intelligence in the mean time, better options appear to include education - and preprocessing human sensory inputs using machines, and post-processing their motor outputs using machines - i.e. intelligence augmentation.

China is planning to sequence the full genome of 1000 of its brightest kids

Terrance Tao, run and hide!