Book extending Sophia DAO programmatic article The Biosingularity is Near to argue that human intelligence enhancement is preferable to dysgenics-driven Dark Age or the AI paperclips.

Here is a (preliminary) chapter plan:

1. The Garden of Forking Paths

• A Short History of the Third Millennium: Scenarios include AI ascension or extinction, or “business as usual” (i.e. dysgenic decline and possible Neo-Dark Ages).
• Summary of the arguments for a Biosingularity/nooceleration – individual life outcomes, group/national success, avoiding dysgenic collapse, and a greater chance of solving existential problems such as life extension, AI alignment, and qualia.

2. What is Intelligence?

• What is intelligence?: “What you need when you don’t know what to do.”
• Summary of intelligence research: The validity and universality of g; the bell curve; heritability; no replication crisis; strongly predictive of positive outcomes.
• Address common critiques of intelligence research – testing bias; cultural incompatibility; multiple intelligences.

3. The Complexity of Everyday Life

• The g nexus: Relationship of IQ to income, crime, educational attainment, health/longevity, political success, and other metrics of individual success.
• Genius: Needs not just high IQ, but a specific personality suite – openness, disagreeableness, non-conformism (“but it moves”!)
• There don’t appear to be negative trade-offs – e.g. mental health or unhappiness.

4. The Hive Mind

• Very strong relationship between national IQ and economic success, the S Factor, innovation
• Discuss confounders: Culture? Education? Institutions? History?
• The theory on why this relationship exists: O-Ring Theory (Garett Jones); threshold IQ theory (Ushakov/Kulivets)
• Causes of international IQ differences: “Deep Roots”? HBD/race?

5. Apollo’s Ascent

• Condensed version of long planned, never written Apollo’s Ascent book (probably the longest chapter – will probably split this into several chapters).
• Three pronged thesis that will run through the historical analysis:
  • The evolution of intelligence though life history: Not random – De Chardin/Vernarsky concept of the noosphere; encephalization index increasing over time. Roadblock: Dysgenics (when Malthusianism relaxes).
  • But not just embodied intelligence! – since it also has a self-recursive property from its interaction with reality: Can use it to build intelligence amplifying technology (e.g. the base camp; writing; expanding circles of literacy; carving – papyrus – paper; magnifying glasses). Roadblock: Tantalus Effect – problems become harder/”low hanging fruit”; historical cycles of imperial rise and collapse (Cliodynamics).
  • Elite Human Capital: Ethical revolutions, since politics is also a problem that can be solved (e.g. Axial Age; Enlightenment). Roadblocks: Military power of reactionaries and miscalibration/overreach (Wokeness).
• Why didn’t the explosion happen in the Roman Empire or in Song China?

5.1. Intelligence Before Literacy

• Intelligence Before Literacy: Animal intelligence; humans – gradual but accelerating process; not “explosion”; historical PGS-EA as inferred from aDNA.

5.2. The Forgotten Revolution

• Classical Greece: Proto-scientific revolution in the world’s first society to attain “craftsman” literacy rates (~10% instead of 1%) but Tantalus Effect and dysgenics proved too strong.

5.3. The European Miracle

• Why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe?:
  • The “Special Path” thesis.
  • Disadvantages of logographic script as in China (“fish literacy”).
  • Personality traits – autonomy?; non-conformism?
  • Family systems (esp. wrt Islamic World).
  • Burger culture (Rindermann).
  • Empirical culture – mechanical clocks, instruments, lenses.
  • Deep antecedents: world’s highest production of eminent scientists c.1100, and highest literacy region by c.1500.
  • Progressive Jewish emancipation.
• Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Europe? (downstream of Scientific Revolution; coal and water; manufacturing culture).

5.4. The Enlightenment and its Consequences

• The 20th Century: Secular rise in IQ scores (Flynn Effect) outpaced dysgenics x “industrialization” of the academic process enabled continued growth even as class of problems needing to be solved became harder.
• The cessation of the Flynn Effect c.2000 in developed world (and slow progress in developing world); and its apparent reversal in the developed world c.2020. Is liberalism bio-competitive?

6. The Long Dark

• Could there be a neo-Dark Ages under “business as usual” that killed progress as in Greece’s Forgotten Revolution?
• Roadblocks to innovation; to ascension; and potentially even technological civilization under “business as usual”.
  • Fertility Decline – fewer potential innovation. (Might be self-limiting).
  • Reversal of the Flynn Effect – future cohorts not only smaller in absolute numbers, but a smaller percentage of them expected to be geniuses. (Only whitepill: Dysgenics is lower in the most developed countries, and bulk of fertility decline now accrues to the Second/Third World).
  • Emancipation mostly done: Women, Jews, LGBTQ+, etc. have rights in the civilized countries, scant gains from further expansion in circles of empathy (Open Borders main possible exception)
  • Diminishing Returns: On scientific productivity (“lowest hanging fruit”), graphs – Eroom’s Law, Rock’s Law.
  • Institutional quality is getting maxxed out, esp. in the countries where it is relevant
• “Bad” scenarios”:
  • Robin Hanson’s innovation collapse scenario
  • Age of Malthusian Industrialism – in which innovation comes to a halt for several centuries.
• Instead of solving all these problems piecemeal, there’s a way to cut the Gordian knot: Nooceleration. But first the ethics of it.

7. Ethics of Enhancement

• Self-explanatory: Increase individual welfare, create a richer and more equitable world, solve all the other problems from dysgenics to life extension.
• Savulescu and Anomaly’s work on ethics of human enhancement.
• Opinion polls survey.
• Negative portrayal in the popular culture and how it ties in to the wider bio/acc project (there are many parallels between anti-life extension and anti-nooceleration arguments)

8. Roads to Nooceleration

• How can we increase intelligence? Several classes: Coordination tech; reprogenetics tech; pharma tech; biomechatronics tech; Artificial Intelligence. Discuss each of them separately.
• AGI: Most germane today; if it happens, it solves all the other problems (assuming it’s aligned and doesn’t kill everyone instead).
• Coordination: Things like institutions, Open Borders, network states/coordi-nations, biomedical freedom/”right to try” laws, Web3/DeSci. But scope is limited; probably only marginal improvements possible; at risk from reactionaries.
• Nootropics: No hard life extension drugs, so no nootropics have been discovered that create permanent effects.
• Biomechatronics: The brain-machine interface bandwidth problem.
• Reprogenetics: Embryo selection; gene editing; human cloning; iterated embryo selection; synthetic embryos; de novo DNA synthesis
• Future Bio/Acc: Transgenics; animal uplift; cortical supercomputers.

9. Posthumanity: What Success Looks Like

• Biological “Deep Utopia”: How would a society of much smarter humans or posthumans look like and function?