-[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming about about](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) working at an embryo selection company (if they needed programmers—but everyone needs programmers, these days), and having that be my altruistic[^altruism] contribution to the world.
+[^eugenics-altruism]: If it seems odd to frame _eugenics_ as "altruistic", translate it as a term of art referring to the component of my actions dedicating to optimizing the world at large, as contrasted to "selfishly" optimizing my own experiences.
+
+[^polygenic-score]: Better, actually: [the heritability of IQ is around 0.65](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ), as contrasted to [about 0.33 for cancer risk](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26746459/).
+
+[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos, the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
+
+But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is making it look less likely that we'll get that much time.
+
+If our genetically uplifted children need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers,