Taking Clones Seriously

Would the clones be at least as smart as the original?   On the yes side we have the Flynn Effect, which is the steady increase over time of IQ scores.  If this represents a real increase in intelligence (as opposed to just measurement error) this means we would expect a modern clone of someone born in 1903 to be smarter than the original perhaps because a reduced pathogenic load is making nearly everyone more intelligent.  

On the no side, the more exceptional someone is, the more regression to the mean we should expect from the clones.  If your intelligence is some combination of genes and luck then the smartest person ever should have had an enormous amount of luck (say in terms of how random noise influenced brain development) as well as exceptional genes.  The clones, on average, will  have much less brain development luck than the original did.

R> cloningBoost(successP=(1/300000000), preThreshold=(1/300000000), heritability=0.8)
# [1] 0.148684202
R> unlist(Map(function(threshold) { cloningBoost(successP=pnorm(threshold), preThreshold=pnorm(threshold), heritability=0.8) },
               seq(0,-8, by=-0.5)))
#  [1] 0.9447298251 0.8778126221 0.7922355447 0.6996006781 0.6080710792 0.5220580968 0.4435373873 0.3731751928
#      0.3109859370 0.2566634390 0.2097376297 0.1696489955
# [13] 0.1357875174 0.1075174469 0.0841969256 0.0651871840 0.0501318209

round(digits=0,
    unlist(Map(function(threshold) {
        cloningBoost(successP=pnorm(threshold), preThreshold=pnorm(threshold), heritability=0.8) / pnorm(threshold) },
        seq(0,-8, by=-0.5))))
# [1]              2              3              5             10             27             84            329           1604           9819          75541
# [11]         731681        8933802      137633507     2677226875    65788482879  2042914354508 80585337764361

Super smart people are 10 a penny. But for every genius working to make AGI safer, there's 10 working to bring AGI sooner. Adding more intelligent people to the mix is just as likely to hinder as to harm.

More concretely, if we were to clone Paul Christiano what's the chance the clone would work on AGI safety research? What's the chance it would work on something neutral? What's the chance it would work on something counterproductive?

And how much would it cost?

Seems like it would be a much better use of resources to offer existing brilliant AI researchers million dollar a year salaries to work on AGI safety specifically.

Shouldn’t the ethics of cloning be the same as the ethics of having children normally? If you could have kids with von Neumann’s capabilities, it’s ethical as long as you raise them right and don’t abuse them. Presumably it’s the same with a clone army of von Neumanns: don’t neglect them, beat them or send them to public schools and it should be fine.

Isn't the guy who founded the AI alignment field the obvious person to clone? Especially given that he's still alive.

I think this is worth taking seriously.

I think the best counter-argument is that, as James Miller points out in a similar comment, there is almost certainly some positive luck in creating a Von Neumann (or a Christiano) and only a small reduction in ability takes somebody to merely one among thousands of peers. With enough clones, one should expect a few serious successes, but if we create lots of capable AI researchers for only a few people capable of making unusual leaps in safety then the tradeoff would not be very clear (though I would guess still positive given, as Matthew points out, heritability of most personality traits).

The better option, though more extreme, would be making people who we were confident would be above the normal range of human abilities. I think this would answer Yair's worry that more smart people would be just as likely to accelerate unsafe as safe AI. If there were a small, connected group of people with far superior ability to create both safe and unsafe AI, the strength of competition would not be as strong and the amount  of slack and ease of cooperation amongst those at the frontier would be greater. Also, while intelligence is not directly related to being right, or altruistic; it's in everybody's personal interest not to create unaligned AI, and we would expect these people to be good at identifying risks to themselves. Even if they were to attempt to use it for their own ends, this is likely to be better for humanity than AI not aligned to any human.

The more promising pathway towards this seems to be iterated embryo selection on polygenic scores for IQ (+ any other trait expected to be helpful) through in vitro gametogenesis, which is not currently possible but may be possible within a decade or so and could generate people with intelligence well beyond current human limits. Gwern has a gigantic write-up of the subject here if anyone is interested, which I won't try to summarize.

Clones of von Neumann, or anybody else for that matter, are just time-delayed twins. That is to say, you get embryos with (at best) the same genetics, but that have to be gestated, raised, educated, and form their own experiences throughout.

Maybe the average intelligence of adults who came from von Neumann embryos would be substantially greater than from the average population, such that the extremely intelligent ones occur a hundred times as often as usual. That's probably the most optimistic outcome. Then again, maybe the radically different life experiences (such as being one of ten million in a prototype massive project on generation timescales, which historically do not go well) would make the upper extreme less likely.

So in the really great case, you raise ten million clones that are 100x more likely than average to be top tier in intelligence. But even doing nothing, you are likely to get just as many in a few years from the general population. To substantially increase the fraction of extremely smart people, you're going to need a bigger multiplier than a hundred for top-tier intelligence, or raise something like a hundred million clones, more than the population of most nations.

That's after you get past the difficulty of creating viable clone embryos at all, and finding enough women or creating good enough artificial wombs to gestate them all (without doing anything that might harm their chances of being extremely smart in adulthood), and then raising them in environments conducive to becoming intelligent. Just the initial experiments to establish viability of the idea would involve timescales on the order of a generation or two, even if there were no other practical or ethical considerations.

So all of this looks possible, but not at all likely to be effective for preventing AI catastrophe or anything else that might happen within a hundred years.

I think this is an interesting discussion to have (even if it's unlikely to be realized due to negative societal opinions of cloning).

It's worth being aware that cloning a dead person isn't currently technologically possible. You need an intact nucleus, I believe (though I'm not an expert). Cloning a living person is probably possible, since other primates have been cloned, though the success rate there was poor.

Regression to the mean is important to consider as well, as other comments have pointed out. If you could clone a great theoretical physicist, what you get is probably not a great theoretical physicist, but rather a pretty good theoretical physicist. There does not seem to be a shortage of pretty good theoretical physicists in the world, and if anything maybe there is a glut. It would seem tragic for the outcome of the project to be a bunch of pretty good theoretical physicists who are forced to settle for data science jobs.

Therefore you may be better off considering professions where there is a shortage of pretty good talent. Software engineering is such a field, which is why pretty good software engineers make a lot of money. So you might consider cloning a great software engineer, such as Jeff Dean or the like (and there are enough of them out there that you could probably find one that would consent to the plan). The Dean-clones would likely not match the original in capability, but they'd be well equipped to make a good living and contribute in a positive way to society.

Another thing to consider more explicitly is the replacement value of a person, from a societal perspective. How much money they make is a relevant but very-imperfect measure. For example, a top pro sports player makes a lot of money but offers barely any value over replacement, because if they didn't exist, then somebody else would be the top player. For that reason, the safest bet is to consider people who make a lot of money in ways that seem generally pro-social, such as engineers and entrepreneurs.

As far as entrepreneurs go, cloning a founder-billionaire seems potentially interesting. Elon Musk seems to have created billions of dollars value, so maybe Musk-clones, even though (because of regression to the mean) not quite as talented or driven, would create a lot of value too.

How closely correlated are the IQs of identical twins, anyways?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/834518.Cyteen has a fictional exploration of a similar topics (trying to achieve not just intelligence transfer, but also expertiese in a relevant field)

I agree, it's indeed a topic worth of a serious consideration. 

A related approach is mind uploading. I would compare it with cloning as follows:

Pros: 

• create the exact same mind, with all the genius and wisdom, without regressions to the mean etc
• no need to wait for 15+ years to grow the clone
• likely much easier to scale (e.g. create 10 instances of the entire MIRI, and task them with 10 different problems to solve)
• it might be possible to run the uploaded mind much faster than real-time (e.g. an instance of the entire MIRI working x1000 faster)
• it could grant immortality to existing alignment researchers (they are not getting younger)

Cons:

• depending on implementation details, there is some risk that the uploading mind could go rogue (the risk could be partially mitigated by a careful selection of the people to upload)
• unlike cloning (which is already a today's tech), mind uploading still requires some large R&D effort
• uploading is unlikely to be useful for cloning dead people (but maybe [LW · GW] not)

There are paths to mind uploading that don't require extremely detailed scans & emulations of the brain. Maybe one of the paths will take less time than growing a clone.