<assuming that the Flynn effect continues in 200 years everyone will be smarter than the smartest man in the world. an absurd concept.>
Not at all. The smartest man in the world is not very bright in absolute terms. He is quite clueless. Compared his memory and recall speed with Google's for example. Compare Kasparov's ability to beat the top chess programmes - he can't unless the machine isn't allowed to do this that and the other. Properly designed machines can obviously clean up the smartest people. Humans are just a kilogram of wet chemistry, with lumberingly slow chemical conductivity processes enabling thinking from sluggish cell to sluggish cell.
When photons and electrons and magnetic fields get whizzing along in cyberspace 'thinking', they don't have to wait for molecules to travel a distance and bump into each other. We have an inbuilt handicap which we can't escape.
The smartest man in the world is still just a random collection of cranial DNA which is unlikely to be simply the best possible, even if choice is limited to existing DNA sloshing around in the gene pool without additional mutations or genetic engineering.
With 6 billion of us, I think there are a lot of genes which combined into one person would give a large increase in brainpower. They are distributed around, with Hawking having some which Einstein didn't have. Get all the good ones, put them all into one head and then we'd really have some thinking going on.
A few years ago, I was thinking of doing just that! An intelligence researcher I know would do the work, finding the hot-stuff DNA, then we could set up a McDonald's embryo selection and design business and women could bring in their eggs, and tick off what they want in their little darling. "Would you like IQ170 with that?" Mothers wouldn't say, "No, I'd like a dullard please". They'd be sued by their embittered offspring for a start.
Women select what they think is a smart bloke, or as smart as they can get, while having other good stuff too [they don't look for a single variable; a nasty, ugly IQ170 nerd will be left in the computer room with his sadistic self-designed 3D pornography].
Given the effort people and their offspring put into "education", trying to make mush into something comestible, it would be a lot easier and faster and even cheaper, not to mention a lot more fun for the child, to just plug in the "right stuff" so the child could do the study in 2 minutes then go and play all day. If you have ever seen [or done it yourself] youngsters slogging over tough stuff which their brains are simply ill-equipped to process, it's quite sad. They want to be good, but can't. They fail. Failure is bad. Everyone should be able to succeed. But they can't with goop for brains.
What's even worse is that parents and teachers put pressure on the poor things, telling them that if only they'd work harder they could do it. The youngster believes these supposedly knowledgeable people only to fail, which doubles their pain.
The answer is the Flynn Effect, with genetic engineering turbo-charging to cut to the chase.
Everyone smarter than Stephen Hawking and Einstein combined is the way to go. They were dummies. Look at Hawking; still can't figure out black holes and a unified wave function to describe everything properly, even after decades of mucking around with them. It's just a lousy cosmos for God's sake!
Mqurice
PS: We don't need to discuss women because the smartest woman is not as smart as the smartest man. We are talking genuine brainpower here, not gender neutrality and equal rights. See previous discussions. Of course, after we have finished with genetic tinkering and they don't mature earlier than men, then they might be as smart. People will reach adulthood at age 30 in the new-age humans. Imagine how cool that would be - a huge long childhood instead of the current brief period of joy before adulthood crushes the spirit and imagination. |
