…Were there such a thing, I think it’s fairly obvious that these solutions you allude to would come out of “our” mainstream scientific community. But, again, perhaps there is no “we”; in any case, said scientific community doesn’t appear to be interested in these particular issues. And with a perversity typical of this age, it’s plain as day that the scientific community in the West has already hamstrung itself. For one thing, there are far too many debates on ethics and law and “fairness”, far too few ambitious works.

Small example: Springer’s book on “Cognitive Enhancement” is 80% ethics and social justice, 20% science. What’s more, the science the book contains is badly outdated, at least a decade behind the cutting edge. What this signals is that the perpetual/ongoing (yet so obviously one-sided) ethical debate takes precedence over progress in the field.
http://www.springer.com/biomed/book/978-94-007-6252-7

This is just a small part of the problem. I’d best not get started on the perverse research grant system, academic systems that reward mediocrity, the hundreds of academic journals that are borderline if not outright fraudulent, the glacial pace of progress today as opposed to a few decades ago, etc. Look at what this has wrought: The United States of America is no longer capable of launching humans into space. The USA hasn’t broken ground on a new nuclear reactor since 1974, despite the fact that new reactor designs show great promise, and that China and India are both heavily invested in thorium reactor technologies. For its part, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry are both in shambles — and this is almost entirely due to the FDA’s heavy-handed and sluggish regulatory processes.
…The mainstream scientific community is failing us utterly, particularly where government is involved. And government won’t be able to keep its paws off cognitive enhancement and genetic engineering.

With all that said, it’s heartening to see that the Chinese are capable of moonshot research projects that the West clearly considers unethical and unfair. Their efforts to enhance human intelligence and take charge of the evolution of our species are laudable — regardless of however their project ends up. What’s absolutely certain is that these sorts of efforts can not and should not be left to the FDA.

I think that it’s a question of degree. If biological intelligence enhancement technologies only result in modest gains — if, for instance, Hsu oversold the potential of his research & genetic engineering leads to IQ gains of 2-3 standard deviations, but cannot consistently result in much more of a boost than that — then what you’re suggesting is probably most likely. We’ll have a smarter, more virtuous, more productive, and more peaceful society. Better humans. Perhaps even a new golden age.

But the article doesn’t stop at modest intelligence gains. Perhaps this is hyperbole, but they keep talking about the “1,000 IQ.” As in: “Crudely speaking, IQs of order 1,000, if the scale were to continue to have meaning”.

…Entities of such immeasurable intelligence would be as far above humans as humans are above apes. And as it’s reasonable that they’d use their enhanced capabilities to enhance themselves still further, they’d soon look down upon us just as we look down upon c.elegans. (Or “it”, not “they.” It seems plausible that there’s only enough room for one entity at the very top!) So we wouldn’t have better humans, we’d have an altogether different species on our hands, for there’s no chance that this group of engineered mutants would consider themselves “human.” This is essentially the unfriendly AI apocalypse scenario — with one key difference in that we cannot “program” friendly posthumans. It/they would either take pity on us and let us die off peacefully, or it/they would take perverse pleasure in ruling over an utterly inferior and largely useless slave caste, or it/they would annihilate us, just as we annihilate our garden pests.

We can and should take evolution into our own hands, but we’re going to need to be careful about it. It’s probably wisest, at this point, to take small steps.

(I’m pioneering in the use of abstract litanies if you haven’t noticed)

An offhand speculation would be that progressivism is a traumatic repression triggered by the inability to grok the non-anthropomorphic nature of the anthropocene. I can say for certain that the most deluded young cathedralists I know think there is NOTHING important besides emancipatory eschatological communist revolution, and every other subject is qualified in accordance with its perceived (in)congruity with the goals of forced collectivization and expropriation. If Hsu’s concerns with the coming age of as-yet-inexperienced inequalism are genuine then I sympathize for his ravaged conscience, but his religious grief seems bearable and thankfully he barely mentions it. Otherwise the paper is truly a humbling and encouraging think-piece.

It’s set roughly 20-30 years in the future, with a crumbling society facing the looming threat of a technological singularity. Each of the superpowers has their own AI project, but the most advanced is run by a bureacratized, corporatized future version of Google. The neocameralists, along with several other factions, are battling to gain control of the AI before it escapes its box.

Interesting to consider Erebus and Hattori’s comments side-by-side; can astronomic IQ enhancement really allow us to outsmart Gnon? Erebus’s Right Accelerationism vs. Hattori’s Left Accelerationism…