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fleg [soylentnews.org] writes:

A thought provoking article [nautil.us] by Stephen Hsu, Vice-President for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University.

Essentially he suggests that the fear of human level AI is unwarranted, because alongside its development, will be the development of human genome editing techniques which will be able to increase the IQ of humans.

These two threads—smarter people and smarter machines—will inevitably intersect. Just as machines will be much smarter in 2050, we can expect that the humans who design, build, and program them will also be smarter.

Its an interesting idea, but I'm not sure I buy it. Whilst we may indeed eventually know enough to edit the human genome to increase IQ, it might be tricky to justify the experiments on ethical grounds. Its one thing to edit it to avoid disease, its another to do it just to see if you can get a higher IQ.

He then goes on to speculate what this future might look like...

Better human minds invent better machine learning methods, which in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds.
[...]
The feedback loop between algorithms and genomes will result in a rich and complex world, with myriad types of intelligences at play: the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silico) and some strangely familiar (hybrids). Rather than the standard science-fiction scenario of relatively unchanged, familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, we will experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences. For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.

He ends with...

New gods will arise, as mysterious and familiar as the old.

Original Submission