Supercharging the nervous system with biological, ion-transistor computer chips
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
EDIT: typo
Has anyone found a better one that isn't behind a paywall?
I know I'm far below the potential I had when I was 10 in terms of raw intelligence, and I believe many people could've been a few thousand times smarter if we had only tried making them smart.
Going to chips when we haven't even learned to train our brains looks ridiculous to me.
This is not something I am opposed to from a scientific point of view.
We do it with livestock, so why not us?
(Before I accidentally invoke Godwin's law, I'm not saying I agree with the other things the Nazis did or that I agree with eliminating non-eugenic friendly individuals).
EDIT: I actually disagree entirely with eugenics - this was an experiment ot see what happens if you apply plain logic and no ethics to the problem. The number of upvotes was slightly worrying!!! For reference, my daughter is disabled and would fall foul of any appropriate eugenics principles which is not right.
I guess there is nowhere good this conversation can go.
Why not have the eugenics institute(s) find people of merit on whatever sets of measures they want and pay those they choose to have kids or to supply sperm/eggs/parenting (whichever they think important for the traits)? Maybe also give subsidized child-care to their progeny. This would allow for competition of metrics between and inside such organizations.
Sure only using positive feedback might be a bit slower than also availing ourselves of negative ones. But negative ones seem more tricky to implement, and we don't actually know what the species will need in the future, i.e. if we even have a single goal in this search space. Ethically less complicated to nurture the flowers you want to see blooming than to have a hand in cutting off others.
2. Yes, amplifying possibly unfair advantages is a nasty side-effect of this, but in a "mostly clean an functioning" capitalist society with not that much corruption, mafia and stuff this could be mitigated (I even goes the US comes close enough to this... by comparison on a global scale).
3. I don't think this will "put us at each other's throats"... poorer people to which the tax is targeted at should feel more motivated to have a better life, like swimming pool and better sports car than to have kids... or we'll need to fix this with more "pro-consumerist propaganda"!
4. And about positive versus negative feedback/motivations... I might have an overly "dark" view of human nature, but I think only negative/pain/punishment will work for those that need to be discouraged in having children (benefits might make the other change their minds and have more children but my intuition tells me it won't work - yes, we need some sort of controlled social engineering experiment to check this assumption, of course).
On the other hand, the eugenics institutes I mentioned ("organizations" maybe you like that word better?); well, those could be lots of different groups of like-minded people/sub-groups spending their own resources the way they want to increase the frequency of traits in the world that they value.
If I and some friends want to pay to subsidize progeny of our choosing, how is that more scary than the various states of the world financially penalizing people (even sterilizing or jailing people in other suggestions of yours) toward similar ends?
a tax is centralized, but the fact that some can pay it and some cannot it not dictated by a central authority, that's the reasoning. The state would not decide who has enough money to pay the tax, and this would be an emergent effect from economy. NOBODY would decide and this I think would be a good thing!
Your group of friends could just as well finance the poor people that nevertheless they think have desirable traits.
NOTE: I still would'n support such my proposed soc-eng strategy in any current society because the erosion of human rights and possibility for abuse is far too great, so the discussion is entirely theoretical anyways, but it was fun
NOTE: The only eugenics I am for are those based on voluntary gene replacement.
People predisposed to certain disorders usually have less offspring anyway... so nature does a pretty good job at this without help (ever seen a person with a severe mental illness having more than a couple of children, even by accident?)
"...eugenics. This is not something I am opposed to from a scientific point of view. We do it with livestock, so why not us?"
You can be predisposed to a lot of things -- diabetes, heart problems, and so on -- most of those don't necessarily prevent you from reproducing. But being "intelligent, motivated, imaginative" has little to do with having a "disadvantageous" genetic makeup leading to health issues. So you are not taking the whole "nature" part into account, only part of it.
Also note that I am not necessarily supporting eugenics, just thinking aloud. At the same time, I don't see how your proposal is any better than "classical" eugenics from the human rights point of view. We can take it one step further and assign an importance coefficient for voting. Let the professor/researcher vote count for 3 units; as for the proles, .7 will suffice. After all, why shouldn't people with intelligence, self-control, and imagination have more of a say in where the country is headed -- it's mostly their kids who will live in this country in the future, so it's only fair.
NOTE: Yes, such a measure or anything similar would lead to human rights erosion that might amplify further, and this is why I wouldn't actually promote the proposed soc-eng strategy in any current society, but that's a different thing....
That importance coefficient used to exist but it was mostly a measure of social influence rather than something that made sense.
I personally vote for dictatorship, with me as benevolent dictator ("Hold on, I'll just get my rape shoes") of doom.
(and even to become something like a researcher and university professor you need much more than high IQ)
That's my Human Shearing Prison Camp's slogan! We're also big in the soylent green business.
Unfortunately, the problem with tests is it's vary hard to measure the right things. And vary easy to end up with a Japanese style system where meaningless information becomes important simply by being on the test.
So, in the US we sterilized some people who had genuine genetic issues, but others because they where slightly below average and came from a poor background, or and others for being gay.
What are we even testing? What values are we trying to breed into or out of humanity? How do we form the selection criteria?
Most importantly, do we have any evidence that genetics has a strong effect on these values? I'm going to guess no on that.
If we can use this to help paralysed people move again, it seems to me that it would be a win.
IMO there is a LOT of untapped potential in the human brain yet and going to chips for speed upgrades looks ridiculous.
I can tell you I have incredibly good and fresh memory but it's much worse when it comes to web-accessible stuff, like what's PHP's function for this or that, while at the same time I can recall conversations from south park episodes I haven't seen in years.
I have googled the same function at least a dozen times while at the same time I could recall every detail of the Silmarillion after having read it only once (that was a while ago and I had much better memory but still).
It is highly likely that accessibility lowers the ability to retain knowledge in its raw form, as increasingly the brain relies on pointers to base a google search on instead of keeping track of the whole thing.
Trying to supplement the brain with technology while we haven't even started trying to develop our intelligence, is a stupid idea imho.