Imagine all humans working at their full potential. Would we have fewer people because we do not need that much potential?
Would this have caused world wars decades, centuries, or millennia earlier?
What will be the cost of making all humans work at their full potential?
Maybe a hard problem to solve.
It's pretty dated regarding the roles of women and men, but the ideas are very interesting nevertheless. One of the big insights is that many people might not be ready to operate at full potential - they would succumb to various forms of insanity.
Look how the Internet's 'network effect' amplified the voices of conspiracy theorists all over the world. Now imagine an enhancement of that kind of paranoia: this is what the super-rationalist protagonists had to deal with in Brainwave...
They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are scattershot and disorganized.
But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative expression, and wealth, too.
Imagine taking another small step in the direction towards developing and exploiting human talent and allowing for self-actualization.
That was what I was getting at in my previous post: having everyone at peak potential is great when everyone is aligned. If there is internal strife, peak potential just means bigger conflicts. Taken to the extreme, that means bigger wars and billions of dead people. Until we can figure out the coordination problem, human limitations are not the biggest problem IMO.
My counterpoint is that even without people being aligned, we're far outperforming the past and what people hundreds of years ago thought we might do with increased privilege. Indeed, we even have less strife overall, even if we have many more axes of disagreement and fewer shared values.
Most of us have more interesting work that more fully uses our intellectual potential than typical people had a few hundred years ago.
And most of us also get more time in leisure, now, than people a few hundred years ago.
I think there's progress, but it's uneven. Look at what step changes of using a little more human creativity and intelligence-- the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial and Information revolutions-- completely upending our society each time.
We really do have more people working stem and less need for physical resource use, at least in some areas.
Improving the development and deployment of existing human intelligence is the strongest logical pathway for expanding human intelligence.
1. Most humans don't develop to anywhere near their full potential.
2. It's unclear whether even the "best" humans are anywhere near actual limitations.
3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential that could be better accomplished in other ways.
Things like efforts to expand AI potentially chip away at 3.