"intelligence and physical fitness" are overrated. Think of a generation without mental illnesses. People that is balanced and happy. People that has no malignant fobias and does not get fat just because does not know when to stop eating.
You are still right, that they should also be smarter and healthier and better looking that us if they can. But I see a bigger change if we adress our mental problems first.
Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why? http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004...
Be content with who you are and where you are, and find your calling to go farther and higher if you can't be content. Just... no reason to be depressed.
Today we have the benefit of knowledge and training. Do we have more innate intellectual horsepower?
Speaking of more horsepower, could manufactured eugenics come at a cost of unintended side effects? How would we be benchmarking horsepower? Would we have the foresight to know some improvements would come at a cost of others? Would an intellectual arms race sacrifice traits such as altruism or curiosity or creativity for more easily measurable traits?
It seems very likely. Though not from genetic improvements. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Personally I dont believe IQ correlates with g. And anyways, how can you even define g in the first place, let alone IQ? There seems to be some colloquial tautology here: Ddoing so by defining it as IQ, then testing for IQ and calling that g. It is ridiculous.
From Wikipedia:
>Ulric Neisser estimated that using the IQ values of 1997, the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80. Neisser states that "Hardly any of them would have scored 'very superior', but nearly one-quarter would have appeared to be 'deficient.'" He also wrote that "Test scores are certainly going up all over the world, but whether intelligence itself has risen remains controversial."
If you're referring to giant computers that took up a room, they really weren't that far off with that vision. Sure, a modern laptop computer or even smartphone has more computing power than an old mainframe, but we still have giant room-sized systems, but today we call them "server farms" or "datacenters".
Who is going to build more fit Thomas Paines or Edward Snowdens, and under which powrer structures would they be allowed to?
If anything, we're the lucky ones to see these problems grow from the start. The ones after us will be in the deep end right from the start.
We could use it to remove defects and certain predispositions though to fine tune our genetic code.
But I remain skeptical about any super humans.
C-sections make that limit obsolete.
One may say that, intellectually, the humanity is already split into two unequal parts - less than 1% of, let's say, intellectually capable people, and the rest (I belong to the rest).
It is important for us (the rest) to let the 1% work and drive the progress, and not to interfere. Unfortunately, this too requires effort, so the end result is... you know, just turn on the TV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
In a few centuries we might call the two camps Eloi and Morlocks.
It will raise questions over whether non-upgraded humans are obsolete...