I am interested in collaborating on proposals for human intelligence enhancement projects. I have several unusual projects and ideas documented here: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/nootropics including brain surgery, directed evolution of brain microbes, directed evolution and selective breeding of smarter animal populations, cell therapy (neurons from a smarter animal, inserted during fetal development, maaaybe post-birth), open-source software for brain implants (firmware etc), open-source software for brain surgery robotics, and, of course, human embryo genetic engineering.
Possibly. I’m not so clear what’s going on with the experiments. The one you cite that has a healthy animal getting smarter also states “Mice allografted with murine GPCs showed no enhancement of either LTP or learning.”, which suggests the same wouldn’t work with humans. Possibly you could do it with gene-edited human neurons / stem cells. But it feels super speculative whether that would improve much. But maybe.
It’s not clear to me and possibly other readers what level of research or speculative research you personally find worthwhile. (I don’t necessarily mean within the context of the grant program your post was discussing. Just with regards to the goal of biology winning or intelligence enhancement )
As a first draft, roughly, I think the speculation is worthwhile IF AND ONLY IF it’s in a context where it will then be followed up by maker/breaker investigation, on the question of “whether / how this can actually lead to SHIA in the real world”. This includes going back and forth between skeptically searching for flaws, and optimistically searching for workarounds/alternatives/reasons for hope. It also includes thinking about the whole process of getting to the working tech, including
would this even increase intelligence meaningfully, and how would we know
getting researchers and funding for the research at various stages
having intermediate feedback on success
questions about how society will receive it—researchers, regulation, funding, and deployment are all related to this, so if you’re so dismissive of these questions that you don’t consider them at all, there’s a significant chance you’re just barking up the wrong tree in terms of actually getting this done
Like what? Which ones plausibly significantly increase intelligence?
Note that this has significant risks and huge resulting difficulties. People generally don’t want to offer crazy elective risky surgeries.
(I general I don’t much buy “try it on animals and see what works” because of the issue where human brains are exceptional, and where we wouldn’t have a great way of testing intelligence in animals IIUC.)
Animal brain architecture is very similar to human brain architecture. There have been other surgeries for humans that have improved IQ in cases of severe debilitating disease. Naturally, nobody thought to try this on normal humans. … at least to my knowledge.
You’re talking about revascularization? It’s interesting, but would need a lot of fleshing out.
To step back a bit, I appreciate you thinking about these things and proposing ideas, but in order to make something actually work, I think there has to be a lot more in depth exploration. In particular, there’d have to be iterative maker/breaker investigation of the idea. In other words, I think you should argue against your own idea, then improve the idea and counterargue in favor, then critique the new version again, and repeat. Then for some ideas, you might actually convince yourself that the idea isn’t that workable or promising; for other ideas, you might be able to make a more convincing case and/or put together a promising version of the project.
This is possibly interesting, but it would need more argument / detail. At the moment, mainly I’d view it as an interesting vector for gene editing a bunch of neurons. I’m skeptical of things like “add a bunch of BDNF” increasing intelligence much, but I could maybe be convinced otherwise.
Probably for me to want to suggest that someone fund a project on this, you’d need an expert on board, who can explain well what’s been tried, what the bottlenecks are, what you’re going to try that’s different, why it would plausibly work, why it would be able to support the cargo, what the cargo is supposed to do, etc.
Well, I have some details regarding microbial nootropic evolution on my page. I’ll leave that for now but happy to discuss if prodded.
With regards to your comment about what has been tried before, you have to keep in mind that people generally have not tried to improve IQ so directly. There has been a lack of projects and resources in these areas.
For example many of the transgenic mouse experiments that have improved intelligence have been small projects that were one-off, focused on a single gene or mutation. To my knowledge there has not been a large-scale or directed project to seriously pursue the prospect of developing intelligence enhancement.
Even domestication projects have been rather limited, IIRC often resulting in lower intelligence(?).
directed evolution and selective breeding of smarter animal populations
I’m not sure I get the point of this. If you succeed, then now you’re doing horribly unethical+immoral experiments on intelligent conscious beings at a significant scale with little benefit. In terms of genetics, we already know enough about the polygenic architecture of intelligence to probably get to world-class-genius levels. On my view, making that feasible for many people / whoever wants, is more important (and easier and safer and more likely to work) than pushing much past that, if that’s relevant.
(I also do not in fact belief you can evolve an animal population to be human-level intelligence within a couple decades. If it’s, say, chimps, then even leaving aside ethics, you have only a few generations. If it’s, say, mice, then you’re probably really far from having genius mice.)
Further, I don’t see much intermediate benefits, whether financial or scientific.
To be clear, it’s worthwhile to test out strong reprogenetics on animals; but that’s in part because you’re skipping the intermediate generations, and instead just seeing if you can directly vector a trait by vectoring the genome based off polygenic scores from the current population.
Developing higher intelligence is not unethical or immoral. I am very surprised to hear you say otherwise. I think that in a lot of these discussions people seem to go into them with some sort of base assumption that everything is going to be abhorrent and awful and terrible. I have given you no indication of that. I think it’s an uncharitable assumption to assume that developing higher intelligence through these methods is inherently unethical or immoral. Intelligence is extremely beneficial and extremely moral to develop. Also on the detail level I don’t actually believe that you would need to breed an animal population to human-level intelligence to benefit from this sort of project. I think that you would be able to learn many things that could be applied to humans even if the animal population is developed to a level that is below human intelligence.
I am interested in collaborating on proposals for human intelligence enhancement projects. I have several unusual projects and ideas documented here: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/nootropics including brain surgery, directed evolution of brain microbes, directed evolution and selective breeding of smarter animal populations, cell therapy (neurons from a smarter animal, inserted during fetal development, maaaybe post-birth), open-source software for brain implants (firmware etc), open-source software for brain surgery robotics, and, of course, human embryo genetic engineering.
Possibly. I’m not so clear what’s going on with the experiments. The one you cite that has a healthy animal getting smarter also states “Mice allografted with murine GPCs showed no enhancement of either LTP or learning.”, which suggests the same wouldn’t work with humans. Possibly you could do it with gene-edited human neurons / stem cells. But it feels super speculative whether that would improve much. But maybe.
It’s not clear to me and possibly other readers what level of research or speculative research you personally find worthwhile. (I don’t necessarily mean within the context of the grant program your post was discussing. Just with regards to the goal of biology winning or intelligence enhancement )
As a first draft, roughly, I think the speculation is worthwhile IF AND ONLY IF it’s in a context where it will then be followed up by maker/breaker investigation, on the question of “whether / how this can actually lead to SHIA in the real world”. This includes going back and forth between skeptically searching for flaws, and optimistically searching for workarounds/alternatives/reasons for hope. It also includes thinking about the whole process of getting to the working tech, including
would this even increase intelligence meaningfully, and how would we know
getting researchers and funding for the research at various stages
having intermediate feedback on success
questions about how society will receive it—researchers, regulation, funding, and deployment are all related to this, so if you’re so dismissive of these questions that you don’t consider them at all, there’s a significant chance you’re just barking up the wrong tree in terms of actually getting this done
I think that some ideas are born fragile and they need to be incubated and insulated before they are exposed to the horrors of politics.
I’m talking both about politics, but also and mainly about the technical plan.
Like what? Which ones plausibly significantly increase intelligence?
Note that this has significant risks and huge resulting difficulties. People generally don’t want to offer crazy elective risky surgeries.
(I general I don’t much buy “try it on animals and see what works” because of the issue where human brains are exceptional, and where we wouldn’t have a great way of testing intelligence in animals IIUC.)
Animal brain architecture is very similar to human brain architecture. There have been other surgeries for humans that have improved IQ in cases of severe debilitating disease. Naturally, nobody thought to try this on normal humans. … at least to my knowledge.
You’re talking about revascularization? It’s interesting, but would need a lot of fleshing out.
To step back a bit, I appreciate you thinking about these things and proposing ideas, but in order to make something actually work, I think there has to be a lot more in depth exploration. In particular, there’d have to be iterative maker/breaker investigation of the idea. In other words, I think you should argue against your own idea, then improve the idea and counterargue in favor, then critique the new version again, and repeat. Then for some ideas, you might actually convince yourself that the idea isn’t that workable or promising; for other ideas, you might be able to make a more convincing case and/or put together a promising version of the project.
This is possibly interesting, but it would need more argument / detail. At the moment, mainly I’d view it as an interesting vector for gene editing a bunch of neurons. I’m skeptical of things like “add a bunch of BDNF” increasing intelligence much, but I could maybe be convinced otherwise.
Probably for me to want to suggest that someone fund a project on this, you’d need an expert on board, who can explain well what’s been tried, what the bottlenecks are, what you’re going to try that’s different, why it would plausibly work, why it would be able to support the cargo, what the cargo is supposed to do, etc.
Well, I have some details regarding microbial nootropic evolution on my page. I’ll leave that for now but happy to discuss if prodded.
With regards to your comment about what has been tried before, you have to keep in mind that people generally have not tried to improve IQ so directly. There has been a lack of projects and resources in these areas.
For example many of the transgenic mouse experiments that have improved intelligence have been small projects that were one-off, focused on a single gene or mutation. To my knowledge there has not been a large-scale or directed project to seriously pursue the prospect of developing intelligence enhancement.
Even domestication projects have been rather limited, IIRC often resulting in lower intelligence(?).
What I mean is, what’s been tried regarding using bacteria as persistent delivery mechanisms in the brain.
I’m not sure I get the point of this. If you succeed, then now you’re doing horribly unethical+immoral experiments on intelligent conscious beings at a significant scale with little benefit. In terms of genetics, we already know enough about the polygenic architecture of intelligence to probably get to world-class-genius levels. On my view, making that feasible for many people / whoever wants, is more important (and easier and safer and more likely to work) than pushing much past that, if that’s relevant.
(I also do not in fact belief you can evolve an animal population to be human-level intelligence within a couple decades. If it’s, say, chimps, then even leaving aside ethics, you have only a few generations. If it’s, say, mice, then you’re probably really far from having genius mice.)
Further, I don’t see much intermediate benefits, whether financial or scientific.
To be clear, it’s worthwhile to test out strong reprogenetics on animals; but that’s in part because you’re skipping the intermediate generations, and instead just seeing if you can directly vector a trait by vectoring the genome based off polygenic scores from the current population.
Developing higher intelligence is not unethical or immoral. I am very surprised to hear you say otherwise. I think that in a lot of these discussions people seem to go into them with some sort of base assumption that everything is going to be abhorrent and awful and terrible. I have given you no indication of that. I think it’s an uncharitable assumption to assume that developing higher intelligence through these methods is inherently unethical or immoral. Intelligence is extremely beneficial and extremely moral to develop. Also on the detail level I don’t actually believe that you would need to breed an animal population to human-level intelligence to benefit from this sort of project. I think that you would be able to learn many things that could be applied to humans even if the animal population is developed to a level that is below human intelligence.
It’s not the higher intelligence that’s bad, it’s the forced breeding or other dangerous experiments on much smarter animals.
Like what?