The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas

Psychosurgery or pharmaceutical intervention to encourage some of the more positive autistic spectrum cognitive traits seems more likely to work than this. We are far from identifying the genetic basis of intelligence or exceptional intelligence, never mind an aspect as specific as rationality.

It's also not clear that it is in someone's self interest to do this. I know you said retroviral genetic engineering, but for now I'll assume that it would only be possible on embryos. In that case, if someone really wanted grand children, it is not clear that making these alterations in her children would be the best way to achieve that goal.

Retroviral genetic engineering once we know what genes control rationality.

Would those genes have time to be expressed later in life?

Also, how heritable is rationality? How do we even measure it, to find out? And if we find some subset of our genes which can be reasonably tweaked to enhance rationality, I'm guessing that they would probably affect people's capability to be rational, in a bunch of indirect ways. There would have to be a memetic component, alongside any genetic tweaks we make. I think.

That sounds a bit too long-term, though. By the time that becomes viable and socially acceptable (if it ever becomes so), we will be many presidencies into the future.

Also, for people to recognize that rationality enhancement is in their best interest you need some baseline level of rationality.

Do you know of any evidence suggesting strong heritability of rationality?

Martin,

I hate to seem rude about you or your book, which I must commend you for for going to the time and trouble of writing and publishing, but it seems that the thesis presented is contradicted by a simple piece of economics.

To see the mistake, look at this paragraph summarizing the chapter on "Make Work Bias" from The Myth of the Rational Voter

Make-work bias

Caplan refers to the make-work bias as a “tendency to underestimate the economic benefits from conserving labor.” (p40) People tend to equate economic growth with job creation, even if those jobs are wasteful or outright detrimental to growth. Economists argue that this is precisely wrong: growth comes from increases in the productivity of labor. The resulting increase in productivity, ceteris paribus, causes people to be dismissed from existing jobs and encourages them to seek more socially valuable opportunities. Caplan makes special emphasis of the movement away from farming over the past two hundred years—from 95% of Americans as farmers to just 3%—as an illustrative example. Those millions who are no longer farming can be employed to make iPods, maintain communication networks, and run restaurants

Just because the average consumer is unemployed doesn't mean he has no income. For example, he might own shares in robot companies that pay a big dividend. Why would they pay a big dividend? Because, by assumption, the robot company makes extremely useful products. The person might also get a government handout, which would be financed by heavy government taxes on these extremely productive robot/AI companies.

Furthermore, just because Robots and AI-systems can do all of the pragmatically necessary work, it doesn't follow that no-one will want a human to do something. For example, you might want a real human musician rather than a robot, etc.

In this happy state of affairs, people would probably cease to be motivated by money, and instead be motivated in part by pursuit of other scarce resources, such as the time of people who had rare and desirable traits, or by "making a difference to the world"-type considerations. Though I suspect that most of the motivation would come from just wanting to go and have a good time. Drinks are served, time to party, etc.

Re: "If the average consumer is unemployed and has no income, he is obviously not going to be purchasing stuff for his machines. In fact, ownership of the machines will concentrate into a shrinking elite as machines take the jobs of average people."

Sure - but that was not the point which you were making that I was criticising:

You argued that unemployment would mean that spending would decline - and the economy would plummet or crash.

Whereas a more accurate analysis suggests that those in charge of the machines will ramp up their spending to feed the demands of their machines - thereby contributing to expenditure in the economy. In other words, the machines will buy and sell things - if not directly, then via companies or humans. This is not really a "jump into the stuff of science fiction" - people regularly buy things to "feed" their machines today.

The machines act as consumers - in that they consume things - even if there is a human or corporation who is buying the things involved somewhere. So: the whole idea that the economy will collapse because nobody is earning money and buying things falls down. Machines will still be earning money and buying things - even if they will be doing it by proxy agents in the form of corporate or human masters.

This idea is a fairly central one in "The Lights in the Tunnel" - and it is based on unsound thinking and bad economics :-(

Re: "Everything produced by the human economy is ultimately consumed by individual human beings."

That seems like a rather muddled way of looking at the situation. Machines have needs too. They slurp up gas, oil, electricity, raw materials. They consume - and excrete - along with all other agents in the biosphere. Companies act as non-human consumers too. It could be argued that machines and companies are slaves to humanity (to some extent - though the inverse perspective - that they are using us to manipulate the machine world into existence - also has considerable validity) - but that doesn't mean that we consume their waste products.

Re: "If too few people have the ability to purchase END products, the mass market economy will collapse."

No: the issue is not the number of human consumers, but their total spending power. Rich minorites commanding huge squads of machine minions could generate a large demand for resources - and the also ability to produce those resources - thus lubricating the economy very effectively.

Of course in a human democracy, voters would try hard to ramp up corporation taxes - in order to resist such huge inequality - but that is another issue entirely.

Re: "Somehow, the work has always expanded to use most of the population of working age."

Machines are still very stupid in many work-related domains - relative to humans. The issue of what on earth the unemployed will do is likely to arise with greater acuity once machine capabilities shoot past our own in most industry-related domains - retail, farming, distribution, mining, etc.

I go into these issues on: http://alife.co.uk/essays/will_machines_take_our_jobs/