What Does LessWrong/EA Think of Human Intelligence Augmentation as of mid-2023?

Networking humans is interesting but we have nowhere close to the bandwidth needed now.

GPT-3 manages with mere 12K dimensions on the residual stream (for 175B parameters), which carries all information between the layers. So tens of thousands of connections might turn out to be sufficient.

Creating a super-genius is almost trivial with germ-line engineering.

Eh, I mean, everything I hear from geneticists on any topic suggests that DNA interactions are crazy complex because the whole thing wasn't designed to be a sensible system of switches you just turn on and off (wasn't designed at all, to be fair). I'd really really be suspicious of this sort of confidence.

Also honestly I think this actually incurs into problems analogue to AI. We talk about AI alignment and sure, humans shouldn't have such a large potential goal space, but:

1. you just messed with a bunch of brain stuff so who knows what the fuck have you done, maybe in making the brain more rational you've also just accidentally removed all empathy or baseline care for other humans
2. regardless of 1 imagine now having these super-genius mutant kids being raised in I assume some specific nurturing environment to help them flourish... dunno, I don't think that results in some particularly salt-of-the-earth people with empathetic goals. Being raised as a demigod savior of humanity by people who all invariably feel much stupider than you seems like exactly what you'd do to create some kind of supervillain.

And that's of course suspending ethical judgement on the whole thing or the way in which germline editing can go wrong (and thus scores of children actually born with weird genetic defects or mental disabilities).

Creating a super-genius is almost trivial with germ-line engineering.

Not really true - known SNP mutations associated with high intelligence have relatively low effect in total. The best way to make a really smart baby with current techniques is with donor egg and sperm, or cloning. 

It is also possible that variance in intelligence among humans is due to something analogous to starting values in neural networks - lucky/crafted values can result in higher final performance, but getting those values into an already established network just adds noise. You can't really change macrostructures in the brain with gene therapy in adults, after all.

locked behind massive time and children investments

Maybe not as long as you're thinking; people can be very intelligent and creative at young ages (and this may be amplified with someone gene-edited to have high intelligence). 'Adolescence' is mostly a recent social construction, and a lot of norms/common beliefs about children exist more to keep them disempowered.

children investments

I mean, that makes the likely death and suffering toll sound more acceptable I guess as PR expressions go, yeah.

I agree that electrode-based BCIs don't scale, but electrode BCIs are just the first generation of productized interfaces. The next generation of BCIs holds a great deal of promise. Depending on AGI timelines, they may still be too far out. They're still probably worth developing with an eye toward alignment given that they have primarily non-overlapping resources (funding, expertise, etc.).

Butcher number & Stevenson/Kording scaling discussed more in the comments here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KQSpRoQBz7f6FcXt3#comments 

Discontinuous progress is possible (and in neuro areas it is way more possible than other areas). Making it easier for discontinuous progress to take off is the most important thing

[eg, reduced-inflammation neural interfaces].

MRI data can be used to deliver more precisely targeted ultrasound//tDCS/tACS (the effect sizes on intelligence may not be high, but they may still denoise brains (Jhourney wants to make this happen on faster timescales than meditation) and improve cognitive control/well-being, which still has huge downstream effects on most of the population)

Intelligence enhancement is not the only path [there are others such as sensing/promoting better emotional regulation + neurofeedback] which have heavy disproportionate impact and are underinvestigated (neurofeedback, in particular, seems to work really well for some people, but b/c there are so many practitioners and it's very hit-and-miss, it takes a lot of capital [more so than time] to see if it really works for any particular person)

Reducing the rate at which brains age (over time) is feasible + maximizes lifetime human intelligence/compute + and there is lots of low-hanging fruit in this area (healthier diets alone can give 10 extra years), especially because there is huge variation in how much brains age.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/neuro1_lab-grown-human-brain-organoids-go-animal-free-activity-7085372203331936257-F8YB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android

I'm friends with a group in Michigan which is trying to do this. The upside risk is unknown because there are so many unknowns (but so little investment too, at the same time) - they also broaden the pool of people who can contribute, since they don't need to be math geniuses. There aren't really limits on how to grow organoids (a major question is whether or not one can grow them larger than the actual brain, without causing them to have the degeneracies of autistic brains.). More people use them to focus on drug testing than computation.

I know many are trying 2D solutions, but 3D is important too (https://scitechdaily.com/japanese-scientists-construct-complex-3d-organoids-with-ingenious-device/?expand_article=1&fbclid=IwAR0n429zFV4uQnyds94tuTCFbPNdSdJecpMreWilv6kpQTRacgw64LTTZp4)

Doing vasculature well is one of the hardest near-term problems (frontierbio is working on this though some have questions of whether or not the blood vessels are "real vessels"), but scaffolding is also one (maybe there are different ways to achieve the same level of complexity with alternative scaffolding - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16247-7 ). Thought emporium used plant tissue exteriors for scaffolding - though this obvs isn't enough for complex brain tissue.

Bird brain organoids may be an interesting substrate b/c bird brains do more than mammalian brains with limited volume, and also don't depend as much on 5-6 layer cortical architecture or complex gyrification/folding structure.

BTW, carbon-nanotube computing might be worth exploring. Here's a preliminary app: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/tiny-lights-in-the-brains-black-box

look up thought emporium!! Potentially tangentially relevant: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-04893-0,  Morphoceuticals, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.01156/full, augmentationlab.org, https://minibrain.beckman.illinois.edu/2022/05/06/webinar-review-understanding-human-brain-structure-and-function-with-cerebral-organoids/, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/organoids-hint-at-origins-of-enlarged-brains-in-autistic-people/ (INSAR has sev presentations of those who grow autistic brain organoids)

(talins)!

[note: I know that current progress of organoid research seems like it will never go fast enough to "make it", but discontinuous rates of progress cannot be ruled out]

The research on brain training seems to disagree with you about how much it could have helped non-task-specific intelligence.