Truly a terrifying possibility.
Just like GMO doesn't mean bad (I eat organic food by the way), a lot of this goes to intent. If science wants to push us forward and make us better. I'm all for it. If they want to engineer us to be resistant to industrial chemicals or pollution so that companies can pollute more, or make super soldiers that is when you have to be terrified . Not just because we have something artificial.
I'm scared of being replaced. I'm also worried such humans would be so different than us, they wouldn't identify with us. Maybe even come to despise us. They would form their own ingroup and view us as enemies even.
I've met someone that had high IQ, and identified with high IQ like some people identify with their country. He legitimately hated low IQ people, was ok with exterminating them, and said he would prefer to die or commit suicide than lose his intelligence. It was such an alien way of looking at the world to me.
You're on Hacker News and you're afraid of nerds? Come on. We're right here. Ask us what we think of you.
>I've met someone that had high IQ, and identified with high IQ like some people identify with their country. He legitimately hated low IQ people, was ok with exterminating them, and said he would prefer to die or commit suicide than lose his intelligence. It was such an alien way of looking at the world to me.
To be honest, he probably went through a lot of pain and maltreatment to acquire that kind of point-of-view. He's not an alien! He's a person. Just because his cognition has less noise in it and he needs fewer samples to reach the same inferences doesn't make him some fundamentally different kind of creature: all the algorithms are the same, only their free parameters are different.
Smart people have empathy and feelings too, and in fact, most of the time the most genuinely hurtful thing we experience (speaking as someone who is too often told that he's the "smart guy" in the group, even among nerdy, intelligent people) is precisely the Straw Vulcan stereotype about intelligence. We're not cold-hearted, we're not aliens, we're just people. Putting us in gifted programs as kids is a great idea. Forcing us to compose prodigal concertos at age 12 is probably a bad idea. Treating us with respect and fellowship works best.
What happened to this guy I was talking about, was high IQ defined his identity, what separated him from others. Fortunately most high IQ people do integrate fine into society, we all still have a lot on common.
But it's likely the superintelligent babies would not integrate well. They would only be able to communicate and find things in common with other supers, and not idenitfy with us normies. We'd be subhumans to them.
The day we're able to make batman a reality someone will also make The Joker a reality.
While some might think, "oh well they would just guide us on how to treat Earth better and we all gonna live happily ever after", I would rather bet there would be no good reason for such investment on their part; you don't invest time and energy into training monkeys not to leave the Zoo perimeter; you just put high fences and plug them to electricity.
Honestly, and selfishly, the better race of human is just that - a better version of humans. Sadly I personally would accept their superiority.
It's not as if you'd have a choice in the matter, any more than neanderthals had a choice when we came along.
We are like kids playing with loaded machine guns, currently we are working on removing that fiddly thing called a safety.
And we're like how hard can i be, our parent mother nature does it all the time.
But that's irrelevant to this. Because we are dealing with the actual genes that determine intelligence, we can estimate the exact distribution of intelligence, and predict where a set of genes would fall on that distribution. See my comment below.
By that same logic, there are 0.0001 or 10000. Its completely baseless.
So a 1,000 IQ would mean that the probability someone had been naturally born before of equal or greater intelligence would be more than 1 in a trillion trillion trillion...
This is possible because genes are mixed up randomly every generation. The probability of getting the exact optimal combination of genes, out of a thousand genes which affect intelligence, is like flipping a coin and getting heads a thousand times in a row. It will never happen unless you intelligently select every gene artificially, intentionally place every coin down on heads.