New cause area: human intelligence amplification

Yeah, you’re right.

Ok, thanks for noting! (It occurred to me after I wrote that that translation would be a major use case and obviously a good one.)

I realize the post was arguing exactly for that, but it seems like a pretty divisive topic even within the EA community itself, and it raises a lot of risks and open questions that other interventions don't face to the same degree

You're right, it certainly wouldn't make sense for it to immediately jump to being a top priority cause, yeah, even if I'm arguing it should maybe be one eventually. If we're being granular about the computations I'm bidding for, it would be more like "some EAs should do some more investigation into whether this could make sense as a cause area for substantially more investment".

it seems more justifiable and defensible to the general public, institutions, or people who might join EA.

Interesting. Regarding people who might join EA, I don't think I quite see it, but the point is interesting and I'll maybe think about it a bit more.

That said, in terms of societal justification, I would want to distinguish between motivations about AGI X-risk, and concrete aims and intentions with reprogenetics. The latter is what I'd propose to collectively work on. That would still involve intelligence amplification, and transparently so, as is owed to society. But the actual plan, and the pitch to society, would be more broad. It would be about the whole of reprogenetics. So it would include empowering parents to give their kids an exceptionally healthy happy life, and so on, and it would include policy, professional, social, and moral safeguards against the major downside risks.

In other words, to borrow from an old CFAR tagline, I'm saying something like "reprogenetics for its own sake, for the sake of X-risk reduction", if that makes any sense.

In a bunch more detail, I want to distinguish:

• (motivation) my background motivation for devoting a lot of effort to HIA and reprogenetics (HIA helping decrease AGI X-risk)
• (explanation of motivation) how I describe/explain/justify my background motivation to people / the public / etc.
• (concrete aims) the concrete aims/targets that I pursue with my actions within the space of reprogenetics
• (explanation of aims) how I describe/explain/justify/commit-to concrete aims
• (proposed societal motivation) What I'm putting forward as a vision / motivation for developing and deploying reprogenetics that would be good and would justify doing so

For honesty's sake, I personally strongly aim to think and communicate so that:

• My public explanation of my motivation gives an honest (truthful, open, salient, clear) presentation of my actual motivation.
• My public explanation of my concrete aims is likewise honest.
• Both my motivations and my concrete aims are clearly presented.
• My concrete aims have clear boundaries around them. For example, I might commit to certain actions on the basis of my publicly stated concrete aims.
• My concrete aims are consonant with my proposed societal motivation.

This serves multiple purposes. For example:

• I want to work out how, and argue to the public, that reprogenetics is good "on its own terms"; in particular, I want to argue that it's good even if you don't buy into anything about AGI X-risk. This is a stronger position I want to argue for, and expose my position to critique on the basis of.
• I want to work out and communicate to the public / stakeholders a vision of how society can orient around reprogenetics that is beneficial to ~everyone. This involves working out societal coordination. The flag of [figuring out what to coordinate on and how] would be more about the concrete aims and the proposed societal motivation, and not about my background motivations.

I would suggest that EA could do something similar. That might work differently / not work at all, in the context of a large social movement. I haven't thought about that, it's an interesting question.

it seems unlikely that society as a whole would give up pursuing it if it could get there first.

Yeah, I'm quite uncertain on this point. I'm interested in understanding better the details of why AGI is actually being pursued, and under what conditions various capabilities researchers might walk away from that research. But that's a whole other intellectual project that I don't have bandwidth for; I'd strongly encourage someone to pick that one up though!

I'm not too optimistic about AI alignment. But does that mean you'd estimate, for example, an extra dollar in HIA has a better chance of solving the problem than spending it directly on AI alignment? Or even that taking a dollar away from alignment right now to move it to HIA would better reduce AI existential risk? (setting aside the case for just a marginal investment, perhaps?)

I do think that the current marginal dollar is much better spent on either supporting a global ban on AGI research, and/or HIA, compared to marginal alignment research. That's definitely a controversial opinion, but I'll stand on that (and FWIW, not that I should remotely be taken to speak for them, but for example I would suspect that Yudkowsky and Soares would agree with this judgement). I'm actually unsure whether I personally think the benefit of HIA is more in "some of the kids might solve alignment" vs. "some of the kids might figure out some other way to make the world safe"; I've become quite pessimistic about solving AGI alignment, but that's kinda idiosyncratic.

Thanks for engaging substantively!

I don't think people are trying to make AGI because they are concerned that there will be an insufficient number of high IQ humans alive in the next few decades.

I don't feel confident about this in any direction. However, my sense is that it's one of the top positive justifications that people use for making AGI (I mean, justifications that would apply in the absence of race dynamics). Not specifically "there won't be enough smart people"--but rather, "humanity doesn't currently have the brainpower to solve the really pressing problems", e.g. cancer, longevity, etc. If you tell an isolated person or company to stop their AGI research, they can just say "well it doesn't matter because someone else will do this research anyway, why not me". But what about a strong global ban? Then you get objections like "well hold on a minute, maybe this AI stuff is pretty good, it could cure cancer and so on". That's the justification that I'm trying to push against by saying "look, we can get all that good stuff on a pretty good timeline without crazy x-risk".

Regarding your next paragraph, there's a lot of claims there, which I largely think are incorrect, but it's kinda hard to respond to them in a way that is both satisfyingly detailed+convincing but also short enough for a comment. I would point you to my research, which addresses some of these questions: https://berkeleygenomics.org/Explore

If you're interested in discussing this at more length, I'd love to have you on for a podcast episode. Interested?

the more obviously positive quantifiable impacts would be addressing debilitating genetic conditions, where at least we can be confident that the expensive and risky process could alleviate some suffering.

Yeah this is another quite large potential benefit of reprogenetics that I'm excited about. It would require that the technology ends up "safe, accessible, and powerful".

I guess, just to state where some of the disagreements lie:

• I agree the research is complex and multifaceted. (See for example https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Visual_roadmap_to_strong_human_germline_engineering.html and https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html )
• I partially agree about "what intelligence is", in that this is a quite important area for further research. However, I do not agree that we would need to know more, in order to enable parents to make quite [beneficial by their lights] genomic choices on behalf of their future children, including decreasing disease risk and also increasing actual intelligence.
• I agree that at the very beginning some weird rich people would be the ones benefiting. But I'm confident that the technology would become affordable for many--quite plausibly significantly more affordable than IVF currently is (e.g. given IVG). I then suspect many parents would want to give their kid a genomic foundation for high capabilities in general, including intelligence. How much, is of course up to them; I suspect, though, that there would be plenty of people interested in having very smart kids.
• "select a few genes" I'm interested in significantly stronger reprogenetics; we already know many hundreds of genes that contribute to intelligence; and stronger reprogenetics is, biotechnologically speaking, probably feasible--see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html
• Regarding what the kids will do, yeah, they can and should do what they want, but do you think that this is net bad? Or what would be your guess here? Cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2025/11/hia-and-x-risk-part-1-why-it-helps.html and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4K6ikQtHxcG49Tcn/hia-and-x-risk-part-2-why-it-hurts

As far as germline engineering goes, the more obviously positive quantifiable impacts would be addressing debilitating genetic conditions, where at least we can be confident that the expensive and risky process could alleviate some suffering.

Regarding this, see also my comment here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QLugEBJJ3HYyAcvwy/new-cause-area-human-intelligence-amplification?commentId=5yxEpv9vFRABptHyd

The problem is that you aren't in charge of society: once the tech is out there, you don't get a large say in how it gets used.

Right. That's why I'm not like "hm let me write down a list of good things to do with this technology and allow those, and write down a list of bad things to ban, and then that solves everything". Instead I'm like "ok, there's a big set of questions around how society can take stances around this technology; let's figure out whether and how such a stance can actually result in overwhelmingly good outcomes for humanity--i.e. figure out what that stance is, and figure out how to figure it out (e.g. who to bring in to give voice to), figure out how to get to society having that stance, etc.". See for example https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html

Regarding your second paragraph, I'd appreciate some metadata. For example, is this a worry that you're just now thinking of? Is it something you've investigated a bunch and have a lot of detail about? Is this something you feel confident about, or not? Is this something you're interested in thinking about? Are you putting this forward as a compelling reason to not investigate more about whether reprogenetics should be a top cause (as opposed, for example, to one major downside risk that would have to be considered and evaluated as part of such an investigation)?

Anyway, on the object level, I'm interested in thinking about it. I mentioned a class of such worries here https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Potential_perils_of_germline_genomic_engineering.html#internal-misalignment but haven't investigated that particular worry.

I don't feel very worried about it because in fact these children would be quite varied in themselves as a class, and there would be quite a lot of variation, so that there's no clear distinction between kids resulting from reprogenetics vs. not. See the diagram in this subsection: https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation.html#intelligence Further, by default these kids would have varied backgrounds, grow up in different places, etc. But, maybe it's a more likely risk than I'm guessing at the moment.

That said, I do think it's very important, for this and many other reasons, to make reprogenetic technologies very accessible (inexpensive, widespread, legal, functional, safe, applicable to anyone), so that there isn't siloing into some small class. I also want this technology to be developed and deployed in a liberal, diverse democracy first, for this reason and for other reasons.

the world may actually be more bottlenecked on broadly implementing existing ideas, thus we need higher average intelligence around the world for that implementation.

I suppose we're bottlenecked on both? I'm thinking of things like

• curing cancer
• curing all those other diseases
• figuring out how to make aligned AGI
• figuring out how to convince people to not make AGI
• figuring out how to improve group epistemics, especially given social media and the internet
• figuring out how society can work out its values better, given all the present constraints (poor incentives, etc.)
• figuring out how to broadly implement existing ideas
• etc.

And a more general point, a lot of genes associated with higher intelligence are also associated with introversion/anti-socialness & with various mental abnormalities like OCD & others. By optimizing purely for IQ in genes you may be creating less collaborative & less happy individuals.

I agree this would be a potentially significant concern if true, but I don't think it's mostly true, or at least I haven't seen evidence for this and I've seen evidence against. Can you point to what you're thinking of? The main thing I'm aware of in this vein is a slight (~.2, depending on source and the exact question) positive correlation between IQ and autism. IQ and other clinical mental conditions tend to be negatively correlated.

For example, Savage et al. ^[1] state:

Confirming previous reports⁵·⁶, we observed negative genetic correlations with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; rg = −0.36, P = 4.58×10⁻²³), depressive symptoms (rg = −0.27, P = 6.20×10⁻¹⁰), Alzheimer's disease (rg = −0.27, P = 2.03×10⁻⁵), and schizophrenia (rg = −0.21, P = 3.82×10⁻¹⁷) and positive correlations with longevity (rg = 0.43, P = 7.96×10⁻⁸) and autism (rg = 0.25, P = 3.14×10⁻⁷).

Their supplementary figure 10:

(from https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41588-018-0152-6/MediaObjects/41588_2018_152_MOESM1_ESM.pdf)

Note also that to a significant extent parents using reprogenetics can, if they want, avoid much undesired pleiotropy by also genomically vectoring against risk for autism etc.; and scientists can build polygenic scores for IQ or similar which exclude genes known to have pleiotropy with those other conditions. That's not necessarily perfect, but I would guess it can feasibly be pretty effective.