This was pretty difficult to forecast in a limited amount of time, so you should take my prediction with a large grain of salt. Broadly, I thought about this as:
How likely is the 1000th baby to involve iterated embryo selection?
There’s a lot of controversy around genetic manipulation for ability, and it’s possible that stem cell gamete reproduction is regulated such that you can only use it as an alternative fertility treatment
E.G. controversy around the ethics of genetic relationship of parents to children (see this series of papers for an overview)
I think 1000 babies is still sufficiently small that it could still be a niche fertility treatment (rather than mass iterated embryo selection), but I could be persuaded otherwise
If the 1000th baby does involve iterated embryo selection, what is the gain in IQ we would expect? (IQ seems like the easiest measure of cognitive ability)
This is pretty hard to estimate.
This paper (Schulman & Bostrom, 2014) suggests a cap of 30 SDs (~300 IQ points). Based on their simulation, choosing one embryo in 10 would lead to 11.5 points (0.8SD) and running 10 generations of choosing 1 in 10 embryos would lead to an increase of 130 points (8.6SD). These estimates may be high – this paper by Karavani, Zuk et al. (2019) suggests the gain from choosing one in 10 embryos is closer to 2.5 IQ points (0.2SD)
This was a really interesting question to look into – what motivated you to ask this? Is there anything you think I missed? (here’s a blank distribution if you want to make your own).
Thank you, that was informative. I don’t think you missed anything, though I haven’t myself thought about this question much—that is in part why I was curious to see someone else try to answer it.
I think genetic selection and/or editing has the potential to be transformative, and perhaps even to result in greater-than-human intelligence. Despite this, it’s comparatively neglected, both within EA and society at large. So having more explicit forecasts in this area seems pretty valuable.
This was pretty difficult to forecast in a limited amount of time, so you should take my prediction with a large grain of salt. Broadly, I thought about this as:
How likely is the 1000th baby to involve iterated embryo selection?
There’s a lot of controversy around genetic manipulation for ability, and it’s possible that stem cell gamete reproduction is regulated such that you can only use it as an alternative fertility treatment
E.G. controversy around the ethics of genetic relationship of parents to children (see this series of papers for an overview)
I think 1000 babies is still sufficiently small that it could still be a niche fertility treatment (rather than mass iterated embryo selection), but I could be persuaded otherwise
If the 1000th baby does involve iterated embryo selection, what is the gain in IQ we would expect? (IQ seems like the easiest measure of cognitive ability)
This is pretty hard to estimate.
This paper (Schulman & Bostrom, 2014) suggests a cap of 30 SDs (~300 IQ points). Based on their simulation, choosing one embryo in 10 would lead to 11.5 points (0.8SD) and running 10 generations of choosing 1 in 10 embryos would lead to an increase of 130 points (8.6SD). These estimates may be high – this paper by Karavani, Zuk et al. (2019) suggests the gain from choosing one in 10 embryos is closer to 2.5 IQ points (0.2SD)
This was a really interesting question to look into – what motivated you to ask this? Is there anything you think I missed? (here’s a blank distribution if you want to make your own).
Thank you, that was informative. I don’t think you missed anything, though I haven’t myself thought about this question much—that is in part why I was curious to see someone else try to answer it.
I think genetic selection and/or editing has the potential to be transformative, and perhaps even to result in greater-than-human intelligence. Despite this, it’s comparatively neglected, both within EA and society at large. So having more explicit forecasts in this area seems pretty valuable.