I partially agree about “what intelligence is”, in that this is a quite important area for further research. However, I do not agree that we would need to know more, in order to enable parents to make quite [beneficial by their lights] genomic choices on behalf of their future children, including decreasing disease risk and also increasing actual intelligence.
I agree that at the very beginning some weird rich people would be the ones benefiting. But I’m confident that the technology would become affordable for many—quite plausibly significantly more affordable than IVF currently is (e.g. given IVG). I then suspect many parents would want to give their kid a genomic foundation for high capabilities in general, including intelligence. How much, is of course up to them; I suspect, though, that there would be plenty of people interested in having very smart kids.
As far as germline engineering goes, the more obviously positive quantifiable impacts would be addressing debilitating genetic conditions, where at least we can be confident that the expensive and risky process could alleviate some suffering.
I guess, just to state where some of the disagreements lie:
I agree the research is complex and multifaceted. (See for example https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Visual_roadmap_to_strong_human_germline_engineering.html and https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html )
I partially agree about “what intelligence is”, in that this is a quite important area for further research. However, I do not agree that we would need to know more, in order to enable parents to make quite [beneficial by their lights] genomic choices on behalf of their future children, including decreasing disease risk and also increasing actual intelligence.
I agree that at the very beginning some weird rich people would be the ones benefiting. But I’m confident that the technology would become affordable for many—quite plausibly significantly more affordable than IVF currently is (e.g. given IVG). I then suspect many parents would want to give their kid a genomic foundation for high capabilities in general, including intelligence. How much, is of course up to them; I suspect, though, that there would be plenty of people interested in having very smart kids.
“select a few genes” I’m interested in significantly stronger reprogenetics; we already know many hundreds of genes that contribute to intelligence; and stronger reprogenetics is, biotechnologically speaking, probably feasible—see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html
Regarding what the kids will do, yeah, they can and should do what they want, but do you think that this is net bad? Or what would be your guess here? Cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2025/11/hia-and-x-risk-part-1-why-it-helps.html and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4K6ikQtHxcG49Tcn/hia-and-x-risk-part-2-why-it-hurts
Regarding this, see also my comment here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QLugEBJJ3HYyAcvwy/new-cause-area-human-intelligence-amplification?commentId=5yxEpv9vFRABptHyd