Get Smarter

Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?

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Posted by veronica  on  06/19  at  01:35 PM

" harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence."

I don't know much about Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics, but can we pass down such a boost to our children?

Posted by mjgeddes  on  06/20  at  12:33 AM

No-one will get smarter unless they are *motivated* to do so, and this motivation is not itself a part of intelligence.

Consider the mythical 'Paper clip' monster with recursive intelligence and no motivation other than the desire to make paper clips. It would only improve to the complexity required for paper clip optimization, and then it's self-improvemet would simply stop.

As I said on M.Anissimov's blog, the Singularitarians have it all wrong. There will be no intelligence explosion unless minds are *motivated* to self-improve and they *maintain* this motivation, if at any point the motivation to self-improvement is lost, the intelligence explosion stops dead.

So in fact IQ is not the most important cognitive skill after all. The problem is not people's lack of intelligence, but the fact that most of them simply 'don't give a damn'.

The relevant cognitive ability here is self-reflection (the ability to introspect, to grasp one's own flaws and change oneself to overcome them). Someone with this ability could start from an IQ that was actually far below the human level, and end up soaring far beyond it.

The answer is not to 'Get Smarter', but to 'Get Reflective'.

Posted by Athena Andreadis  on  06/23  at  07:39 PM

And the answer to Veronica's question is no, unless you believe in Lamarckism -- in which case I have a bridge on Rigel IV I want to sell you. You may pass on a mutation engineered to alter you genetically. The chance is 50/50 per mutation per child because chromosomes recombine each time a gamete (sperm or egg) forms. Pharmacological alterations are somatic, so their inheritability is zero. You can influence your kids much more decisively by epigenetic mechanisms, aka by raising them to the best of your ability.

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