memoir: eugenic dreams

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@@ -521,9 +521,18 @@ Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has
 
 My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of that week in January 2021). Previous AI milestones, like GANs for a _fixed_ image class, were easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands and thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the _details_, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to _combine_ concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.
 
-[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.
+[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming 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[^eugenics-altruism] contribution to the great common task. Existing companies working on embryo selection boringly market their services as being about avoiding genetic diseases, but polygenic scores should work just as well for IQ as they do for cancer risk.[^polygenic-score] Making smarter people would be a transhumanist good in its own right, and [having smarter biological humans around at the time of our civilization's AI transition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2KNN9WPcyto7QH9pi/this-failing-earth) would give us a better shot at having it go well.[^ai-transition-go-well]
+
+[^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.
+
+[^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 racially superior children need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers,
 
-[^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 future of the world, as opposed to selfishly optimizing my own experiences.
 
 [TODO—