The Biosingularity is Near

Solve Human Intelligence, And Then Solve All The Other Problems

We are on the cusp of a new era in which we acquire the capability to augment our biological intelligence and take over our own evolution. Forget the “3-5 years away” timelines previously advanced by Razib Khan and Charles Murray. Embryo selection for IQ will become publicly available in 2025, opening up the possibility of 6-7 IQ point increases with every subsequent generation. And that’s just with the standard IVF cycles of ten embryos. More speculative but scientifically grounded approaches in the pipeline such as embryo genetic editing, adult gene therapy, iterated embryo selection, and synthetic embryos open up the possibility of multiple S.D. increases in polygenic IQ scores by the 2030s, and the appearance of young men and women much smarter than anybody who has ever lived as early as the 2050s.

In this essay, I will briefly outline the basics of intelligence research, and its relationship to individual life success, national wellbeing, and the long-term prospects of our civilization. I will then make make the case for radical human intelligence enhancement across all three of those levels. I will then survey public attitudes towards intelligence enhancement, outline the business case for the noocelerationist space and its synergies with Decentralized Science (DeScI), and conclude with an overview of my own plans for Sophia DAO and how you can get involved.

Psychometrics 101: What is Intelligence?

What is intelligence? The standard academic definition is given by Linda Gottfredson:

Intelligence is ‘the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience’.

Though personally, I prefer Jean Piaget’s more succinct version:

Intelligence is what you need when you don’t know what to do.

As well as the English writer Samuel Johnson’s poetic formulation, as quoted by Arthur Jensen in The g Factor:

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) expressed it tersely when he heard a noted historian pro­claim that it was by virtue of their very different gifts that Caesar became a great commander, Shakespeare a great poet, and Newton a great scientist. Dr. Johnson replied, ‘ ‘No, it is only that one man has more mind than another; he may direct it differently, or prefer this study to that. Sir, the man who has vigor may walk to the North as well as to the South, to the East as well as to the West.”

The foundational core of intelligence research can be summarized in the following seven statements:

1. Intelligence can be rigorously & reliably measured.

2. The spread of people across the IQ continuum follows a normal curve (or bell curve)¹.

3. All cognitive abilities load on a common factor of intelligence known as the general factor, or g.

4. The g factor is universal across human cultures² and is even observed in animals³.

5. Heritability of intelligence is ~0.7-0.8.

6. Intelligence research is by far the most well replicated branch of the psychological sciences.

7. Intelligence is strongly predictive of individual life success & positive group outcomes such as GDP per capita & innovation rates.

It is again worth underlining that there is nothing fringe about this - these are the mainstream views in the field⁴. Contra ideologically loaded critiques, these are the views of political moderates; as per expert surveys, the typical intelligence researcher is a classical liberal who strongly supports gay marriage⁵. Historically, both Nazis and Communists opposed intelligence research and persecuted its practitioners⁶.

Consequently, it is of scant surprise that psychometrics is the single most replicated branch of the psychological sciences:

Steven Pinker on the replication crisis (or lack thereof) in intelligence research.

However, the most important reason for studying intelligence isn’t even so much on account of its high epistemic standards, but because it is extremely predictive of many aspects of the world that would otherwise leave you in permanent confusion. Ultimately, much of life is about navigating your way through problems of interminable difficulty. Individuals who are better at solving problems enjoy greater life success, and their labor commands a higher premium. Likewise, groups which have more smart people capable of solving hard problems tend to create richer and more functional teams, companies, and societies. And at the global level, it is entirely possible that some problems of global existential importance might only be solvable if a critical mass of elite mindpower was to be brought to bear on them.

The g Nexus and the O-Ring

At the individual level, there exists a positive manifold or “g nexus” across intelligence and virtually all indicators of life success, including but not limited to: Lifetime income, education (e.g. high school dropout rates; probability of getting a college degree); crime and prison risk; job performance; and politics under any regime (both US Congressmen and the Nazis under trial at Nuremberg scored far above the population average)⁷.

If we were in a video game, intelligence would be regarded as “OP” (overpowered) to an extent that many would regard as unfair and game-breaking were they aware of the mechanics. Even to the extent that people are aware of this, it is usually accompanied by a lot of cope to the effect that intelligence ceases being predictive of life success beyond some threshold, or comes with serious debuffs on other character stats. However, there are no indications of diminishing returns to IQ beyond any particular level. Smarter people live longer and healthier lives - indeed, polygenic IQ scores are the single best currently extant predictors of longevity⁸. Nor is there any evidence that smart people are more unhappy, have lower “emotional intelligence”, or have more mental health issues⁹. The latter does not appear to be true outside of autism¹⁰.

The predictive power of intelligence, while formidable at the individual level, becomes phenomenal at the group level. An individual can be smart, but hampered by personality defects, low conscientiousness, or banal bad luck. However, in a team, company, or country, these other factors are largely averaged out, and the influence of raw intelligence becomes even more dominant. Consequently, while the correlation between intelligence and life success is usually around 0.4, at the national level the correlation between national IQ and GDP per capita¹¹ and general function¹² rises to an amazing 0.7.

What about the question of causality? This has been exhaustively addressed in the literature, and has been found to mostly run from national IQ to economic success¹³¹⁴. I will not go into the statistical details here. Instead, I will invite the reader to dwell on the above graph. As we can see, there are two major groups of outliers: Countries that are big oil exporters (much richer than predicted by IQ), and countries from the ex-Communist bloc (much poorer than predicted by IQ). These exceptions prove the rule - we would not expect to see them if mere poverty played the biggest role in explaining national IQ differences. Instead, we find that the biggest gap between high IQ potential and economic underperformance is in China, which has human capital on a par with the other developed East Asian economies but lower-middle income GDP per capita. This discrepancy becomes much more understandable when you recall that China spend 30 years under Maoism, a schizophrenic economic system in which you had a higher chance of dying on the job than getting fired that made Soviet central planning seem sane and rational. Conversely, just as this model would predict, China enjoyed the highest growth rates of any big country for decades on end after market liberalization.

Why are smarter countries more productive? One way to look at it is to view the economy as a system for generating and trading solutions to problems. These problems come in two forms¹⁵¹⁶. The first category are “Foolproof” problems that most anyone can solve with varying degrees of efficiency. Examples of Foolproof problems include truckers, barbers, and waiters. The second category encompasses “O-Ring” problems that require the completion of multiple complicated steps by workers above some competency threshold. This includes things such as open heart surgeries, semiconductor design, corporate M&As, or aircraft manufacturing. To make a successful product, all steps have to be done just right, as encapsulated by the eponymous O-Ring, the critical rubber seal interlinking the body of the Space Shuttle, whose catastrophic failure under cold weather conditions led to the Challenger disaster of 1986.

Only a select “smart fraction” of the population can work in the O-Ring sector, so their labor commands a large premium on global markets. The size of this “smart fraction” differs significantly between countries, much more so than mere IQ averages imply due to bell curve mathematics. For instance, 6% of Belgians can solve the hardest class of problems on the PISA international standard tests, whereas in Brazil, only a tiny fraction of high school students can do anything much more complex than a simple, single-step arithmetic operation. Furthermore, since there’s a large degree of labor mobility between these two sectors within countries - a chip designer can always become a waiter - this pushes up wages in the Foolproof sector far beyond what they would otherwise be in a society with no substantial O-Ring sector to speak of. It is the relative strength of the O-Ring sector in the developed world - and the large “smart fractions” that enable it - which explains why a hairdresser earns five times as much in Belgium as in Brazil, even though you will not otherwise expect a Belgian haircut to be innately “better” than a Brazilian one.

Escaping the Great Stagnation

Since the end of the Malthusian era, science-based technological growth has been the source of almost all long-term economic growth. It propels our productivity and opens up the prospect of transhumanist ascension sometime this century. There’s only two problems. First, its core driver - innovation - is extremely concentrated in the world’s richest and smartest countries. Second, the global “smart fraction” that drives this appears to be in absolute decline.

Nature Index score (2017) per capita by country (US = 100).

So far as global innovation is concerned, it is really just a story of the high IQ rich nations. The Nature Index is an index of elite science production based on the numbers of papers published in the most prestigious science journals. As of 2018, the US accounted for 33% of the global total, the “old” EU 26%, and East Asia 27% (inc. China with 18%). The rest of the world is a scientific desert: <2% in Eastern Europe, 1.6% in India, 1.1% in Latin America, 0.7% in the Islamic world, and a mere 0.2% in Sub-Saharan Africa (of which South Africa in turn accounts for three quarters). In a study, we found that the strongest predictor here was national IQ, with affective autonomy - “the independent pursuit of pleasure, seeking enjoyment by any means without censure” - the only other significant factor¹⁷.

Now the good news is that average IQ has increased throughout the 20th century thanks to more schooling and exposure to abstract concepts, better nutrition, and the near elimination of many endemic diseases¹⁸. This is commonly known as the Flynn Effect. Moreover, so far as we can make out, the gap between the developed and developing worlds has been slowly narrowing in recent decades¹⁹. This is unsurprising, because the latter have more scope to optimize the environment for greater health and IQ. However, this already hints at a deeper problem. The environment for increasing IQ in the developed world is already mostly “maxxed out”, while the Flynn Effect stalled several decades ago, and has now gone into reverse²⁰.

The root causes are likely linked to “dysgenic” reproduction, which refers to the phenomenon of smart people having fewer children than duller people, as in the 2006 movie Idiocracy. Although politically controversial, this thesis has been validated in a number of country studies, including in the US/UK²¹ and Iceland²², as well as in a much broader recent meta-analysis. The general picture is that polygenic IQ scores are falling by 0.3-0.4 points per decade, and have been doing so for many decades. Furthermore, dysgenics is actually worse in the developing world, which has higher fertility rates, especially amongst the more traditional/backwards rural populations.

This constitutes a step change from the historical norm. Reproduction seems to have been “eugenic” in terms of intelligence in Great Britain and much of Europe from at least the Renaissance to the Late Enlightenment²³. This was also probably true for much of the world for most of the past 10,000 years²⁴. (The main notable exception appears to have been the Classical World²⁵, and it is perhaps a telling one, in light of its eventual collapse and descent into the Dark Ages). The dysgenic reversal probably began in Early Industrialism, when the world began to escape the Malthusian trap of the prior subsistence age - an unsurpassed triumph of human welfare that brought untold levels of prosperity, reason, and moral enlightenment, but not without its long-term timebombs.

Now these negative trends might be of purely academic interest were it not for some foreboding signs that - with the notable exception of IT - the rate of innovation is falling. Libertarians tend to ascribe this to the baleful impact of metastasizing institutions, often citing Eroom’s Law - the plummeting rate of new drugs discovery after the creation of the FDA - as an illustrative example.

CEPR: Historical Index of Economic Liberty shows steady increase from 1850 to 2020, although sharply punctuated by the World Wars.

The problem with this explanation is that - trigger warning for strong libertarians! - our current institutions are actually quite good from a historical perspective. Global economic freedom has never been higher. The socialist world has collapsed both politically and epistemically, its surviving relicts like Cuba and Best Korea a byword for repressive stagnation, and its new adherents, like Venezuela, a cautionary tale of ruin. I have found that the global rate of corruption has collapsed during this century, with the percentage of firms reporting tax officials expecting bribes falling from almost 50% in 2002 to less than 20% by the mid-2020s, as per the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys. Consequently, I just do not see the case for how institutional ossification can explain the innovation and productivity slowdown - though this is not to say that that current levels of economic freedom shouldn’t be even higher.

I would posit that the decline in innovation is sooner a function of three distinct adverse developments. First, there is the “low-hanging fruit” effect - that is, over time, the problems that need to be solved in order for technological growth at a constant pace become harder. In mathematics, the Pythagorean Theorem is easier than Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory. In technology, the potentialities of the internal combustion engine had become large exhausted by the end of the 20th century. Second, the amount of “elite mindpower” available to work on solving those problems has reached an asymptote, and might now be in absolute decline. At least, that is the logical deduction from the end of the Flynn Effect in the developed world, which COVID-19 appears to have tipped into outright reversal²⁶. Now to be sure, the effectiveness of this mindpower can still be increased, e.g. by improving institutions, increasing labor mobility (Open Borders?), or applying new technologies - from lenses in Renaissance Italy to LLMs today.

But it remains an open question whether that will be sufficient to get us to the glorious transhumanist future.

Robin Hanson preaching fertility-innovation collapse doom at the Vitalia conference in Próspera, Honduras.

Third, there is an accelerating fertility collapse throughout the world. Consequently, not only are the new generations duller, they are also fewer of them²⁷. Robin Hanson argues that falling fertility levels presage an “innovation pause” since innovation depends on a growing economy. My own view is that this is both optimistic as well as pessimistic. Optimistic because Hanson doesn’t (explicitly) model the additional effect of dysgenics and “low hanging fruit”. Pessimistic because he is unduly dismissed of the potential of reprogenetics tech to accelerate biological IQ²⁸. But more on that later.

For now, my modest hope is that I conveyed the following points: Intelligence is important, and a lack of it makes individuals less happy and less successful; nations poorer and less functional; and the long-term prospects of our technological civilization darker and gloomier. From this, it follows that increasing biological intelligence in all respects is not just an economic, but an ethical and existential imperative.

The Case for Nooceleration

In this blog’s inaugural post, I defined “nooceleration” 🧬⏩ as follows:

At its most basic level, noocelerationism (n/acc) loads on the idea that the scope of rational x self-aware thought is what we should be optimizing for on this planet. Loading on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s and Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the “noosphere” - the globe-spanning realm of rational and self-aware thought - it is informed by the intuition that a world of intricately carved rocks doesn’t actually have a noosphere as such! (it’s just the geosphere). Therefore, so long as neither alignment nor consciousness has been solved, it is far better to differentially accelerate towards a “Biosingularity” as opposed to tinkering with the cyber gray goo. Conversely, conformist safetyism or Luddite flight into the “peace and safety of a new dark age” is no panacea either, resulting in a future that is noospherically stunted relative to what could have been; nor does it even definitively preclude doom in the far future.

One criticism may be that there are too many accelerationisms as it is, and that it is cringe to add to their number. Is accelerating biological intelligence really worth delineating from biotech accelerationism (b/acc) or Vitalik Buterin’s d/acc (defense, decentralization, democracy and differential)? Now I am highly sympathetic to both - more so, at any rate, than e/acc, which basically amounts to Leeroy Jenkinsing into AGI’s maws and hoping that Based Beff Jezos’ thermodynamic gods bail you out. However, I think that b/acc is too narrow and specific - removing regulatory barriers to drug approval is great, but it probably won’t revolutionize the world just by itself. Meanwhile, d/acc is so broad that is barely actionable - more of a “vibe” than an ideology - though in fairness, that is not a criticism, since that is kind of its point (see decentralization).

Nooceleration is envisioned as something both incredibly ambitious in its vision, specific on what it perceives as most immediately important (human intelligence enhancement), and concretely practical in step-by-step implementation. Let’s start with the former.

Procreative Beneficence

At the Individual level, my view is simple: In so far as The Tech is within our grasp, not actively actualizing it out of bioconservative considerations borne of religious obscurantism or the Leftist politics of envy deprives future individuals of better and more interesting lives. As such, it is unethical; and to the extent that any outright restriction infringes on individual freedoms and bodily autonomy, it is pathological.

Now to be sure, there are plausible future tradeoffs and dilemmas so far as the wider field of human enhancement is concerned, which are extensively discussed in Jonathan Anomaly’s foundational book Creating Future People. One such dilemma may involve a clash between the ethical principle of procreative beneficence, which is the view that parents should select the child genetically expected to have the best possible life, as argued by Julian Savulescu²⁹; and the orthogonal principle of “procreative altruism”, which emphasizes that there’s a greater obligation for the chosen child to contribute more to the general welfare than any alternative child³⁰. This mostly relates to aspects of personality such as altruism, which is very good for society as a whole, but detrimental at the individual level in so far as pathological altruists can be exploited by free riders. Furthermore, if too many parents decide to select for social parasitism out of selfish individual interests, this will eventually result in a society in which the optimal game theory move is always mutual defection - a very subpar outcome for everyone involved. These are all major ethical conundrums that we will have to spend a lot of time thinking about when they become relevant.

But that time is still a long ways off. Meanwhile, so far as intelligence is concerned, there are no such tradeoffs. More intelligence is better for both the individual and society under any plausibly conceivable circumstances. Consequently, to the extent that arguments against human intelligence enhancement are raised, I find them to almost inevitably load on “truthy” rhetoric to the effect that they undermine human dignity or presume to play God. In this respect, there is a great deal of intersection with arguments against life extension, to which in my opinion the best response was given by Patrick Hayden: “Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” I would adopt a similar position with respect to human intelligence enhancement: “There are Serious Philosophical Issues posed by human intelligence enhancement, and my attitude is that I do not feel myself qualified to engage with them in the proper and constructive way that they deserve without at least another dozen standard deviations in IQ.”

Hive Mind

At the National level, my basic view is that a world with no human intelligence enhancement will be a poorer, less functional, and more crime-ridden one. As previously discussed, the causality mostly runs from low national IQ to poverty, and not the other way round. One does not need to even get into the politically thorny genetics vs. environment debate over the precise reason why national IQ gaps exist. Regardless of the precise balance between them, it’s an unequivocal fact that human intelligence enhancement will translate into a higher national IQ, a bigger “smart fraction”, and the development of an internationally competitive O-Ring sector that lifts all boats. As argued by Ives Parr in The Effective Altruist Case for Using Genetic Enhancement to End Poverty, it is the best and really only bet that development laggards with low national IQs have for future economic convergence.

It is extremely hard to envision what kind of societies people much smarter than us will create. The only systematic attempt to do this that I am aware of was made by Alexander Turok in his 2018 book Posthumanity (available online). However, based on the limited surveys we have of very smart people, such as members of the Triple Nine Society (>150 IQ), we might suppose that such a society will be defined by economic libertarianism, social liberalism, extreme bioliberalism, cosmopolitanism, technophilia, and a commitment to rationalism that rejects idpol traps such as Wokeness and right-wing identitarianisms. This strikes me as a far more equitable and interesting society than our present world with its primitive political discourse, bureaucratic dysfunction, and ethno-confessional identitarianisms.

Finally, it is worth noting that countries which insist on privileging bioconservative values will rapidly fall behind and become irrelevant once the posthuman revolution really gets going. In the present world, even modest differences in national IQ translate into yawning differences in wealth, function, and human accomplishment. Less than 10 IQ points separate Massachusetts, which hosts two of the world’s top five universities, and West Virginia, which is a byword for poverty and opiate deaths. I will not even go into the story of Jewish intellectual accomplishment. The important point is that things will start to accelerate very quickly when superintelligent posthumans start entering the workforce at any substantive scale, and the countries that play host to them are programmed to win our Civilization playthrough³¹.

Solve Intelligence. Solve Everything Else.

At the Global level, a canceled or severely delayed nooceleration carries with it the risk of deeply suboptimal long-term outcomes.

(1) If there is an Innovation Collapse before we get to an intelligence explosion - regardless of whether it happens on silicon or carbon - then we might be in for centuries of technological stagnation. Ultimately, it doesn’t much matter whether this stagnation is a Hansonian “Great Pause” (perma-fertility slump x takeover by insular breeders) or my Age of Malthusian Industrialism scenario (dysgenics x breeder gene saturation). Neither outcome is going to be a pleasant one for our descendants, who will spend centuries in a world decidedly poorer, less equitable, and more stagnant than today’s, let alone the one we could have built if we were smarter. And there is no guarantee that they will be any better placed to build utopia when technological progress does reignite.

(2) If we fail to solve Radical Life Extension, then we banally die. That’s the end for us as individuals. (It’s not even particularly likely that the cryonics centers keep functioning in regressed worlds). Consequently, human intelligence enhancement can be viewed as taking out a life insurance policy the current crop of researchers failing to solve life extension. Consequently, even if Aubrey de Grey is wrong on his optimistic late 2030s timelines, perhaps our much smarter progeny will be sufficiently smart to finish the job in the 2050-60s.

(3) If we fail to solve the Qualia Problem while proceeding to upload our minds or “merge with the machine” anyway, then we could end up with a mechanical clockwork universe, its agents externally indistinguishable, but with no inner world or light of consciousness within. The p-zombie universe would be a strange apocalypse, but perhaps the saddest one: a “Disneyland without children”, as qualia philosopher Michael Johnson terms it.

(4) If we unleash Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) before solving AI Alignment, there is a good chance that we all just die, and take the entirety of the biosphere and an indeterminately large sphere of local space-time with us. Even if the ASI is a unipolar “singleton”, there’s no guarantees it ends up aligned with our interests. Even within our own species, delegating thinking and decision-making to agents who are smarter than us but who do not have our interests close to heart has rarely worked out at either the individual or the national level. And this, if anything, is the optimistic scenario - at least there’s a chance, no matter how remote, that a unipolar ASI will be a benevolent God.

But in my view, the likelier scenario is a massively multipolar ASI one. In light of the near instantaneous and costless nature of digital reproduction, this quickly devolves into AI Malthusianism, in which all readily available energy is appropriated for compute. In such a world, there will be no room for the biosphere - an acre of land can either support a farm that can feed a family, or a solar farm that can power millions of ASIs. Moreover, the individual values and motivations of the ASI’s under Malthusianism wouldn’t actually matter! They can be as gracious, aesthetic, humanistic as you want, but insofar as practicing altruism - i.e., subsidizing the biosphere - requires surpluses, any such altruistic ASI’s will be ruthlessly selected against and winnowed out extremely quickly. The main scenario in which we survive is if the ASI’s collectively coordinate to subsidize the biosphere, and humans in particular. Considering that we will come off as plants with weak signs of intelligence to them, this is a bold assumption to say the least, and I do not think it is likely to have a happy ending.

Now to be sure, the probability estimates of “doom” vary widely, and I realize that far from all readers share my gloomy, quasi-Yudkowskian views. But regardless of your precise views on AI risk, I would nonetheless modestly venture that much smarter posthumans will be more aligned with us than what is for all intents and purposes an alien species that will resemble a fantasy deity at best, cyber gray goo at worst. Furthermore, I would posit that posthumans will more adept at safely navigating the emergence of ASI, or in the event that they decide it cannot be safely pursued in principle, designing mechanisms to forestall it indefinitely without unduly infringing on civil liberties. And then “solving the world” without ASI.

Now obviously, in the event that AI timelines are indeed very short, human intelligence enhancement - and pretty much everything else from life extension to the culture wars - is probably quite irrelevant. Though even in this case, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that a desperate crash program to enhance intelligence within existing adults is a worthwhile (dignified?) endeavor:

Eliezer Yudkowsky calls for crash nooceleration program.

However, in the event that ASI is still decades away - at least the 2050s or later - creating much smarter people would constitute an insurance policy against the current generation of AI alignment researchers not being smart enough to solve AI alignment, and the current world population not being smart enough to realize we should be spending 1,000x as much money on AI alignment. And in the highly improbable but not impossible scenario that machine superintelligence is impossible in principle, then that leaves biology as the only option anyway.

(5) So let’s assume that we all make it (WAGMI). We successfully navigate all the above civilizational pitfalls and existential risks, some of which we may currently not be smart enough to even conceptualize, let alone have any inkling as to what to do about. But even in this pollyannaish scenario, we will still face the problem of what to do once we actually do solve all the other problems. At that point, we will have to answer the Final Question. What is there to do in a “solved world” - the “Deep Utopia” that Nick Bostrom discusses in his recent ponymous book? What is the meaning of life?How do we compile our Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)?

Sophia the Redeemer.

My sub-posthuman intuition is that our posthuman descendants will soon tire of the material plane. Interstellar space is just various permutations of rock, gases, and plasma, and its exploration will get boring fast, with our vast corpus of space opera becoming nothing more than a retrofuturist curiosity. The last epic voyages of posthumanity will take place in the cognitive and psychedelic realms - and to navigate them, we will need the most powerful cognitive engines possible. We will, in the Gnostic interpretation, need to invoke the divine favor of Sophia, who in her role as wisdom deity serves humanity as the intermediary between the fallen material world of the ignorant Demiurge, and the divine spiritual realm of the Pleroma to which we shall seek to return to.

The Biosingularity is Near

Up to this point, this essay has been about theory, but theory is useless without praxis. Enough with the glue huffing - let’s move on to the germane questions: Is there market demand for human intelligence enhancement? Is it technologically feasible? Is there money to be made? And what can you personally do to accelerate nooceleration?

Market Demand: Intelligence is Prestigious

The vast majority of First Worlders oppose embryo genetic editing for IQ. In 2020, less than 20% of Europeans and Americans supported genetically editing babies to make them more intelligent. (Stereotypes about “technophile” Chinese aside, it wasn’t actually that much higher in China, at just 23%). Although this might sound depressingly modest, it nonetheless represents many tens of millions of potential parents and customers.

Moreover, due to the positive correlation between IQ and bioliberalism, it will be the most progressive and moneyed potential parents expressing an interest in human intelligence enhancement. Conversely, opposition to these technologies is concentrated amongst the highly religious, who cite ethical concerns, as well as Leftists who are concerned about its intersections with moneyed privilege and “fascist” eugenics. These are not good arguments, and neither of these two groups enjoy much prestige in advanced societies. Furthermore, even if individual countries do impose severe restrictions, they will be systemically flouted. Those interested in the procedure will fly to offshore clinics in places like Próspera or Kolkata, and it will be precisely the most privileged members of society - the “globalist elites”, digital nomads, “crypto bros”, and sundry Elite Human Capital - who will be in a position to do that. Consequently, I do not expect the authoritarians to triumph in the marketplace of ideas in most countries.

One additional observation is that the percentage of respondents expressing support for embryo gene editing for IQ was vastly higher in India - an astounding 64%. This may be part of a consistent pattern in which Third World nations are more technophile and techno-optimistic than the jaded denizens of the already developed world. Bullish for Bharat!

Finally, it also depends on how exactly you ask the question. The percentage of Americans supportive of embryo gene editing in order to increase their child’s chances of placing in a Top 100 university was 28% in a 2023 poll. This is functionally equivalent to increasing IQ, but hey, normies will be normies - nothing to be done about that (for now). Furthermore, the percentage of Americans willing to do embryo selection to increase their child’s chances getting into Harvard was 38% in 2023. This is the only mature reprogenetics technology, so again, we are talking gargantuan numbers of potential customers in absolute terms.

Both Jonathan Anomaly in Creating Future People and Alexander Turok in Posthumanity speculate that as the usage of reprogenetics technologies for intelligence enhancement becomes prevalent amongst the upper classes, it will acquire cachet and prestige, and filter down to the lower classes. After a decade or two, not augmenting your progeny to have the best chance at life will become looked down upon. Once that dam breaks, there will be no putting this genie back in the bottle.

WAGMI

In light of the vast potential market for intelligence enhancement, I think it’s safe to say there will be a lot of money on the table for bold startups and participants in this space.

So far as the sector as a whole is concerned, consider that even though solving the intelligence problem enables you to solve all the other problems, and some technologies are reaching maturity, funding/interest is still very low even by “out there” sector standards:

• Radical Life Extension: <1% NIH grants / ~2-3% VC funding as share of all biotech / ~1,000-2,000 full-time researchers?

• AI Alignment: 200 full-time researchers?

• Intelligence Enhancement: ~$10M market cap? 10-20 full-time researchers?

In the late 2010s, the life extension space underwent a Cambrian explosion, with the creation of dozens of new companies propped up by a flood of venture capital that would soon be joined by the speculative proceeds of the 2020-21 crypto boom. This was also when Aubrey de Grey’s timelines became radically more optimistic.

I expect something similar to happen in the human intelligence enhancement space in the late 2020s.

This will happen across a wide variety of approaches. Going from least to most speculative, these include:

• Embryo selection for IQ

• Adult gene editing

• Embryo editing for IQ

• Iterated embryo selection

• Synthetic embryos

• De novo DNA synthesis

There are startups focused on at least four of these approaches that I know of, and active research on all six.

In the future, even more speculative approaches like transgenics, animal uplift, and cortical supercomputers are possible.

Alternately, there’s also the Deus Ex approach. Cybernetic enhancement has seen a resurgence of interest thanks to Neuralink’s recent successes, and there are new projects such as the Augmentation Lab popping up Próspera. I am somewhat skeptical about the capacity of cybernetic augments to increase biological intelligence at a fundamental level, but it is nonetheless completely aligned with nooceleration and worth tracking closely as well.

In conclusion, there is no more important task in the world than accelerating biological intelligence, but we are not asking for charity or handouts to accomplish it. I expect some of the startups in the space to become bluechips in the 2030-40s. The collective goal is to solve intelligence, and then solve all the other problems, and make a lot of money in the process.

Don’t Defy DeFi, Don’t Deny DeSci

One of the most interesting developments in the crypto space, and a strong refutation of claims that it is all a scam, is the emergence of Decentralized Science (DeSci).

Vincent Weisser (Molecule DAO) has a good definition:

Decentralized science is a movement that promotes open-source research in order to create a more democratic and equitable scientific system. DeSci allows for a more decentralized and distributed scientific research model, making it more resistant to censorship and control by central authorities. DeSci hopes to create an environment where new and unconventional ideas can flourish by decentralizing access to funding, scientific tools, and communication channels. The goal is to make science more open, collaborative and accountable.

To realize these aspirations, DeSci uses blockchain and the DAO structure to practice transparent on-chain governance and funding allocation, incentivize community participation through tokens and NFTs, and accelerate new publications and patents through Web3 primitives and reputation systems that retain the rigor of traditional scientific publishing while avoiding its bureaucratic rigmarole.

Over the past few years, DeSci it has developed an impressive ecosystem of biotech DAOs, accelerators, and protocols:

The state of #DeSci as of August 2023.

One of the first biotech DAOs was Vita DAO, which collects life extension-related IP-NFTs, funds prospective research in the space, organizes events to propagandize longevity and radical life extension, and has plans to offer discounts on longevity products for $VITA holders³². In the past few months, it has played a major role in organizing a start-up city called Vitalia in the free market oasis of Próspera in Honduras. It aims to acquire its own district in Roatán and to become a full-fledged network that has “making death optional” as its One Commandment.

Since the founding of Vita DAO in 2021, it has been joined by a number of other biotech DAOs, including but not limited to Cryo DAO (cryonics), Athena DAO (women’s reproductive health), Hair DAO (hair loss), Valley DAO (synthetic biology), Psy DAO (psychedelics), and Cerebrum DAO (brain health).

The Case for Sophia DAO

I expect DeSci DAOs to grow in line with the expansion of the cryptosphere and growing dissatisfaction with legacy academic institutions. And I intend to make sure that human intelligence enhancement doesn’t miss this unique opportunity. Consequently, my primary goal right now is to build an analogous structure for human intelligence enhancement: Sophia DAO.

There are several reasons why I consider the DAO structure to be perfectly suited for human intelligence enhancement research. First, it has “transhumanist” vibes, which repels normie academia - there’s a reason that the first prominent biotech DAO happened in life extension, and that many of the other prominent DeSci DAOs are in “out there” fields such as cryonics and psychedelics. Second, intelligence enhancement is unusually controversial, since it is at the intersection of not just transhumanism but also with Far Right ideologies which it is inaccurately associated with³³. This is an issue in the traditional business world, where social status and “handshakeworthiness” plays a major role, but not really much of one in the cryptosphere. People who were early to Bitcoin and Ethereum tend to the extreme intellectual openness, curiosity, and non-conformism that characterize the “Coffee Salon” cultures that historically accounted for a disproportionate share of innovation and new intellectual currents. Third, I expect the human intelligence enhancement sector to benefit from an approach-agnostic actor that can sponsor fundamental research and public goods that benefits the entire space, provision access to prospective companies for crypto investors instead of just leaving it all to the VCs, offer benefits and discounts for stakers, and promote nooceleration and reprogenetics technology in blogs and media.

Finally, there’s the banal fact that despite what I consider its importance, nobody else seems to be interested in doing this. So in so far as I believe what I say it is incumbent upon me to take up this project. As someone with a background in blogging, intelligence research, community management, and reasonably fair knowledge of the cryptocurrency and transhumanism space, I am probably not even the absolute worst candidate for this role.

You can follow updates by signing up to the Sophia DAO newsletter and following it on X.

I aim to soon open up a Discord as part of community building.

I will also continue exploring aspects of nooceleration here. Otherwise, I can also recommend the following aligned blogs:

• Parrhesia
  by Ives Parr

• The Genetic Choice Project
  by Craig Willy

• Aporia
  by Noah Carl & Bo Winegard

My other main goal for this year is to expand this post into a full-fledged book, provisionally titled The Biosingularity: The Case for Human Intelligence Enhancement. This will be an opportunity to elegantly integrate all the various ideas I have had on this topic over the years including Apollo’s Ascent, The Age of Malthusian Industrialism, and my various other transhumanism-adjacent musings from animal rights to existential risks.

On to the Biosingularity!

Imagine the singularity happens but on a biological substrate. Big Brain uplifted whales and elephants, world-spanning cortical forests, conscious oceans as on Solaris… “transparent tigers and towers of blood.” - Anatoly Karlin.

PS. There is a video version of this essay that I presented last month in Próspera.

Image h/t Bryan Bishop. (See his list of proposed genetic edits).

1. Gottfredson, L. S. (1997). Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography. Intelligence, 24(1), 13–23.

2. Warne, R. T., & Burningham, C. (2019). Spearman’s g found in 31 non-Western nations: Strong evidence that g is a universal phenomenon. In Psychological Bulletin (Vol. 145, Issue 3, pp. 237–272). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000184

3. Arden, R., & Adams, M. J. (2016/3). A general intelligence factor in dogs. Intelligence, 55, 79–85.

4. Feel free to ask ChatGPT to confirm if this is a fair summary of what we know about intelligence. It will acknowledge that

5. Rindermann, H., Becker, D., & Coyle, T. R. (2020). Survey of expert opinion on intelligence: Intelligence research, experts’ background, controversial issues, and the media. Intelligence, 78, 101406.

6. That the bourgeoisie were smarter than the proletariat, and that Jews were smarter than Germans, was not an appetizing finding to either totalitarian regime.

7. Too much stuff to footnote. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s Bell Curve and Russell Warne’s more recent In the Know have good overviews of the subject, as well as Linda Gottfredson’s aforementioned Mainstream Science on Intelligence article.

8. Private conversation with researcher in a genomics prediction company.

9. Russell T. Warne’s In the Know addresses common myths about intelligence quite thoroughly, which are otherwise too numerous to individually footnote here.

10. I would personally venture that this is a classic example of a cognitive bias: Smart people who have significant mental health issues are notable - they are eccentric geniuses - in a way that ordinary or duller people so afflicted just come off as dysfunctional.

11. Rindermann, H., Kodila-Tedika, O., & Christainsen, G. (2015/7). Cognitive capital, good governance, and the wealth of nations. Intelligence, 51, 98–108.

12. Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2014). The international general socioeconomic factor: Factor analyzing international rankings. Open Differential Psychology.

13. Christainsen, G. B. (2013/9). IQ and the wealth of nations: How much reverse causality? Intelligence, 41(5), 688–698.

14. Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Karlin, A. (2020). National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits. The Mankind Quarterly, 61(2). http://www.mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/61-2/11

15. Jones, G. (2013). The O-ring sector and the Foolproof sector: An explanation for skill externalities. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 85(Supplement C), 1–10.

16. Kulivets, S. G., & Ushakov, D. V. (2016). Modeling Relationship between Cognitive Abilities and Economic Achievements. Психология. Журнал Высшей школы экономики, 13(4). https://psy-journal.hse.ru/en/2016-13-4/198126879.html

17. Karlin, A., & Grigoriev, A. (2019). Модель факторов инновационной эффективности страны. Siberian Psychology Journal, 71, 6–23.

18. Pietschnig, J., & Voracek, M. (2015). One Century of Global IQ Gains: A Formal Meta-Analysis of the Flynn Effect (1909-2013). Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 10(3), 282–306.

19. Meisenberg, G., & Woodley, M. A. (2013). Are cognitive differences between countries diminishing? Evidence from TIMSS and PISA. Intelligence, 41(6), 808–816.

20. Pietschnig, J., & Gittler, G. (2015). A reversal of the Flynn effect for spatial perception in German-speaking countries: Evidence from a cross-temporal IRT-based meta-analysis (1977–2014). Intelligence, 53, 145–153.

21. Woodley of Menie, M. A. (2015/3). How fragile is our intellect? Estimating losses in general intelligence due to both selection and mutation accumulation. Personality and Individual Differences, 75, 80–84.

22. Kong, A., Frigge, M. L., Thorleifsson, G., Stefansson, H., Young, A. I., Zink, F., Jonsdottir, G. A., Okbay, A., Sulem, P., Masson, G., Gudbjartsson, D. F., Helgason, A., Bjornsdottir, G., Thorsteinsdottir, U., & Stefansson, K. (2017). Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1612113114

23. See Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms.

24. Piffer, D., & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2024). Evolutionary Trends of Polygenic Scores in European Populations From the Paleolithic to Modern Times. Twin Research and Human Genetics: The Official Journal of the International Society for Twin Studies, 1–20.

25. Piffer, D., Dutton, E., & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2023). Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores. OpenPsych. https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.07.21

26. Hampshire, A., Azor, A., Atchison, C., Trender, W., Hellyer, P. J., Giunchiglia, V., Husain, M., Cooke, G. S., Cooper, E., Lound, A., Donnelly, C. A., Chadeau-Hyam, M., Ward, H., & Elliott, P. (2024). Cognition and Memory after Covid-19 in a Large Community Sample. The New England Journal of Medicine, 390(9), 806–818.

27. Robin Hanson argues that falling fertility levels presage an “innovation pause” since innovation depends on a growing economy. My own view is that this is both optimistic as well as pessimistic. Optimistic because Hanson doesn’t (explicitly) model the additional effect of dysgenics and “low hanging fruit”. Pessimistic because he is unduly dismissed of the potential of reprogenetics tech to accelerate biological IQ.

28. Moreover, natalism is a personality trait, hence heritable; ultra-competitive in a post-Malthusian environment; and therefore, any fertility collapse will eventually reverse. See my Age of Malthusian Industrialism series.

29. Savulescu, J. (2001). Procreative beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics, 15(5-6), 413–426.

30. Douglas, T., & Devolder, K. (2013). Procreative altruism: beyond individualism in reproductive selection. The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 38(4), 400–419.

31. There is some degree of irony in discussing geopolitics in light of geopolitics likely to becoming a “solved problem” in the posthuman world. (My best guess: Millions of network states running on a global Constitutional blockchain, as I wrote in my inaugural post on this blog). However, as is usually the case with geopolitical phase transitions, the road is likely to be rocky, and traumatic for those peoples and polities that make the wrong choices. Consequently, nationalists who want the best of their people should logically push for nooceleration no less assiduously than transhumanist globalists. In a previous life, I made analogous arguments to other nationalists and identitarians. I have now long recognized the autistic futility of that exercise. Nonetheless, they remain no less valid for all that.

32. Disclosure: I own $VITA and $CRYO.

33. Again, both Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR banned intelligence research. Many modern Far Rightists are blank slatists.