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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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Why do we need such intensive transformations? We have large populations of very smart people, large populations of very physically capable people. We can sequence genes easily, see which ones are associated with intelligence and physical performance. 250 IQ might be a 1 in a hundred billion genius but still basically possible from blind chance. All we'd be doing is fixing the dice to get an impossibly rare natural creation. Maybe he'd be pretty hungry but we have plenty of calories.

I bet there'd be a bunch of problems with mental illness, you'd need to refine it with time and experience. I know it's more complicated than 'make a statistical model of what genes the smartest people are most likely to have and tick the boxes' but we'd have time for trial and error. Forty years is multiple gamechangers worth of time.

As for how one would edit those genes, I don't know. Technology advanced quickly in the last forty years, we didn't have anything like CRISPR forty years ago. We couldn't even sequence human genes.

all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers.

Come on, it can do more than that. I got it to write some decent Top Gear fanfiction. Google had theirs doing protein folding, which is vaguely relevant.

Even more relevant: https://nyulangone.org/news/new-artificial-intelligence-tool-makes-speedy-gene-editing-possible

Not perfect but surely proof AI is useful on this front?