Peptide style drugs already have clear positive effects on executive function, it's not particularly hard to envision that we'll find other classes of drugs that have similar effects in other cognitive domains. Twenty years is a long time, and we're set up to make absurd gains in our understanding of biology over that time frame. If we additionally are able to mitigate or cure various intellectual disabilities, that's a massive baseline performance boost to the population as well.

If you want some examples in how AI could improve education:

* Alpha School (https://alpha.school/the-program/) reports 2.6× faster learning growth with just 2 hours of AI-driven instruction daily, with students scoring in the 99th percentile nationally.

* Mindspark (https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/scaling-personal...), deployed in Indian schools, demonstrated gains of +0.22 SD in math and +0.20 SD in language in a randomized trial involving 6,500 students.

* A Harvard study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12179260/) found more than 2× the median learning gains using AI tutors.

The broader implications are clear: individualized, adaptive tutoring at scale is becoming accessible in ways that historically required expensive one-on-one instruction. This is also going to be possible in places that historically never had access to this quality of instruction, which again, is a massive boost to the human baseline.

I don't think the future looks like Wall-E. I think it looks like insanely healthy people able to pursue their passions with a level of rigour and capability that has never existed before.

Edit: fucked up link 2, fixed