The minds of enhanced people

[Drashner1]

I doubt they would have a lot of social life with baselines and nearbaselines. It would be hard to relate to people who can't understand their own minds. They are both modos, but relating would be like kidergardeners vs. PHD's. They would have nothing to say to each other.

Phd's often have children who become kindergartners - and they usually manage to have something to say to them.

Beyond that, the common SF trope that superior intelligences must find less capable minds incredibly boring or unrelatable seems to ignore the possibility that a superior intelligence could also possess superior empathy, as well as superior patience. Superiors would certainly eventually have their own communities if/when they wanted them - but they would be an option, not a requirement. Many Su might live in them - but many others would not.

It is no surprise Superiors rule society. No one else can think like they do. With all of the robots around, I'm surprised the superiors even bother with employing baselines. After 2 centuries, the robots would probably take up most jobs on Earth. I would think the cis lunar volume would locked up too since most humans except the vaccum adapted are pricey to put in space. Even in primitive 2016 robots rule space.

Superiors don't rule society - transapients do To them, a Superior is merely a slightly more clever pet (or houseplant, or rock).

Automation does play a major role in the civilization we envision and could indeed do most or all jobs from a point fairly early in the timeline - which simply means that thinking of Terragen civ as being merely 'the culture we have now, but in space' doesn't work. The societies of the OA timeline are going to be quite different from pretty much anything we've experienced or imagined in many many ways.

Todd

[Rynn]

If people who are Homo Superior come into enough people, it would be awkward at first. It would be like the X-men. They would probably live together in a community like a community for Superiors.

This assumes that superiors appear 'fully formed' in terragen society with all the enhanced traits and abilities they are described as having. This isn't likely and it's not how the development of technology or culture works. The early superiors will be barely improved over baselines. The type of modifications they'd get are something that wouldn't be massively obvious at an individual level but would be statistically significant at a population level. For example, let's say the first generation of superiors are 10% more intelligent/capable on average than baselines. In any type of test you do the superiors will score 10% better as a group. That's pretty great for them, in an academic setting that will likely mean superiors get one grade above baselines in most cases (i.e. if the baselines of the class average a B the superiors will average an A).

That matters and it's going to have social consequences, particularly if there is an organisational/cultural movement around the superior project (which unlike neb-tweaking was a coordinated effort from the start to make a unified set of enhancements). But it's not going to make superiors off-the-wall alien super-savants. Human society gets along pretty well with some people being C grade students and some being As. Having a group of people genetically predispositioned to getting in the latter category...well that's not much different to social class IRL but with much harder ability to move up or down.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be topical and there wouldn't be social issues to consider, just that it's a lot more subtle than you propose. At least in the early setting.

I doubt they would have a lot of social life with baselines and nearbaselines. It would be hard to relate to people who can't understand their own minds. They are both modos, but relating would be like kidergardeners vs. PHD's. They would have nothing to say to each other.

To be frank I'm a PhD and whilst I might admit to being of above average intelligence and knowing many peers for who that is true I disagree that results in a total social incompatibility with children. Not that the children analogy is perfect in any case. I do agree that cultures in OA will tend to form between groups of similar toposophy, but there is overlap in that between homo superior and homo sapiens.

Also it's worth keeping in mind that the large empires in the current setting are meta-cultures containing all manner of groups. Even if a superior was so mentally removed from a baseline that communication was difficult/painful there would likely be a handful of sophonts who overlap with each other linearly that can bridge the gulf between the two.

Think of it like toposophic degrees of separation; it might be extremely hard for you to have a direct relationship with the gelatinous blob you have for a neighbour but you have a couple of friends that lie between you and it on the human-blob spectrum and when you're all together good times happen.

It is no surprise Superiors rule society. No one else can think like they do. With all of the robots around, I'm surprised the superiors even bother with employing baselines. After 2 centuries, the robots would probably take up most jobs on Earth. I would think the cis lunar volume would locked up too since most humans except the vaccum adapted are pricey to put in space. Even in primitive 2016 robots rule space.

I definitely think people are gonna get their kids upgraded to compete in the job market, buy they are going to have a hard time in the job market with robots and vecs who work for next nothing. I would think that they would upgrade at the same rate, in which case vecs have the edge in development time. Also, AIs have a big advantage over nearbaselines, at least from what I have seen in the timeline.

Superiors don't rule in the current era, the archai do. And in the sephirotics and many other major powers there is a role in society for everyone. If you're talking about the early setting it's still not true because of the fact they weren't that much beyond baselines yet (as discussed earlier) and because there simply weren't that many of them.

Two other points regarding assumptions you seem to be making here:

1) That being a competitive individual in a market economy is important to most current era sophonts. It's not, outside of the NoCoZo markets are not a dominant form of economic organisation. They exist sure, but they're pretty niche. Your average sophont doesn't have to regularly operate within one because they live in a world in which automation and economic science has moved labour and resource circulation as far beyond the principles of market capitalism as market capitalism is beyond Mesopotamian ledger keeping.

2) That in the early era the numbers of the augmented and the sophistication of augments was as significant as in the later era. It wasn't.

[selden]

FWIW, the "Long Earth" series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_E...8series%29 ) includes some descriptions of problems encountered when Homo Superior interacts with Homo Sapiens.

[stevebowers]

I wrote a short story about early superiors, way back when I first joined the OAUP. The Augmentation Activists were an early group of enhanced humans, who were still struggling with significant problems with augmentation technology as well as their status as proscribed organisation. Eventually the AA became extinct, although their history provided valuable lessons for later, more successful superior clades.

[Drashner1]

FWIW, the "Long Earth" series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_E...8series%29 ) includes some descriptions of problems encountered when Homo Superior interacts with Homo Sapiens.

I've read most of the Long Earth books. I didn't really find the depiction of the Next (the Homo Superiors in question) as being terribly convincing. Also, it felt rather stereotypical in that the 'superior intellects' were described as being both arrogant and apparently completely lacking in any kind of human feelings.

Beyond this, as Rynn has pointed out the early Superiors were much less capable than those extant in Y11k. Likely one century's Superiors were the next century's nearbaselines.

It should also be noted that the various enhancements that OA Superiors developed over time are not all connected with general intelligence and it's not clear what was developed first. Specific talents or physical enhancements might have come first and increased intelligence might have come later.

My 2c worth,

Todd

[Rynn]

Beyond that, the common SF trope that superior intelligences must find less capable minds incredibly boring or unrelatable seems to ignore the possibility that a superior intelligence could also possess superior empathy, as well as superior patience.

Caught this point whilst re-reading and think it's extremely good to keep in mind. There's a tendency in SF and real life that when imagining an extraordinarily intelligent person to crank up the dial on one aspect of human behaviour and leave the rest alone, or even reduce them. The classic falsely of "natural" intelligence being inversely proportional to "social" intelligence for example.

Whilst it's true a superior in the current era would find baselines slow and predictable (sus have a better theory of mind after all) they could still enjoy friendships based on common interests and if anything superiors would find it easier to deal with someone much slower than them than baselines! Talking to a baseline isn't likely to take up a majority of their concentration after all and they would be getting a far richer and more nuanced experience by being able to perceive so many more facets of the interaction.

[Bear]

As someone who has something like su-level intelligence, (185 or so according to some tests) I can report that when I was very young I raged at normal people for being boring and unrelatable. I was an utter arrogant jerk. And it was mostly because I hurt. I was in a little town between the boondocks and the sky and I was lonely and I felt like a literal alien. I spent a few years uncertain whether we were even really human. If it hadn't been for my (also ferociously bright, but closer to normal than I) older siblings ... I don't know what would have happened to me. It would have been harder, and it was hard enough as it was.

Empathy came later. As I say now, I grew up and quit being an asshole. There are a few experiences I consider formative; one of them was meeting a few people as smart as I who were utter and complete assholes and realizing there were things wrong with them that had nothing to do with intelligence but which were just as important. It followed that these things NOT being wrong with normal people deserved some respect. Another formative experience was finally realizing that when I cared for ordinary people I was much happier myself - the loneliness had been largely my own fault when I kept not considering normal people worthwhile to care for.

That said, now that I work with a bunch of really bright people - I can tell you that a bunch of them were alienated and hurt so much in childhood that they never rose above it. A bunch of them are now the fuck-you-I-got-mine breed of Breitbart libertarian, and a bunch of them are narcissistic abusers of other people.

A guy I used to correspond with about the design of virtual machines, who was brilliant and disciplined as an intellectual, turns out to be someone who also featured in my wife's past, as a narcissistic faithless bastard in his interpersonal relationships. He never stopped raging, and later committed suicide.

A guy who was an internationally ranked chess champion, who I used to game with, stressed out so much about finals one year that he quit sleeping. A week after finals he'd become so obsessed with sleep that he started breaking into the homes of strangers in the dead of night to WATCH them sleep. He wasn't back next semester.

Another brilliant friend, with a Ph.D in pharmacology and masters in chemistry and toxicology, who used to be part of the same severely gifted kids club, is now in jail - predictably, on drug charges.

There was one incredibly brilliant guy who was never much of a scholar always an asshole. I pitched him out of a fifth-floor window after he raped someone I cared about. He escaped conviction and committed suicide years later, after committing another rape - leaving his final victim tied to a hotel bed with his blood and brains all over her until the maid came in and found her. Heck of a guy.

A classmate who graduated with me, every bit as bright as I am, went to work for Microsoft straight out of college. Seven years later she had grown so angry at people that she moved alone into a cabin twelve miles from the end of the nearest road and foreswore the use of language. Haven't heard from her since, obviously. When she was still in school, she had a nearly-as-brilliant boyfriend (I never knew him except by reputation) who apparently had so much rage he developed a hobby of blowing up parking jeeps with pipe bombs. None of us knew anything about that until he went to jail.

I went a few rounds with Fred Phelps, who was just as smart as me - but for whom intelligence was nothing more than a weapon. He was a brilliant legal scholar who got disbarred from practicing law, and a brilliant religious scholar who got defrocked and formed his own denomination, and a homophobic, bigoted, hateful bastard who abused his family and preached a hateful neocalvinist bent religion. He never stopped raging. Long may he rot.

Being different is never a picnic, and as the twig is bent so grows the tree.

[Bear]

About half of us get over the rage as we get older. But I think rage is the default for IQ>160 or so people up to about age 25.

[Drashner1]

Hm. Various thoughts here. In no particular order...

a) You mentioned not having empathy as a child/young person. Yet our culture as a whole often talks about how cruel children and young people can be. Also, I've heard various things of late about how studies have indicates that humans may not fully develop the part of their brain until they are in their mid-20s or so.

Is it possible that at least some of what you describe on this matter was at least somewhat 'normal' (e.g., children/young people don't have a lot of empathy and may have a lot of 'rage'), although perhaps amplified due to higher intelligence? Or perhaps just that its impact was magnified due to higher intelligence?

b) How much of a role could nature vs nurture play in this kind of thing? Had you (and by extension hypothetical future proto-superiors) been surrounded by lots of people at your own level and/or 'average' people making an effort to provide you with an engaging environment would that have improved things?

c) Speaking in terms of OA, it should be noted that many Su (and neb) abilities aren't really connected to generalized intelligence per se and that it's not clear which abilities the ancestors of 'modern day' Su were initially gengineered with. Certainly they were not as capable as the Y11K versions. So their transition to higher level intelligence may have taken a number of generations. At the same time, DNI interfaces and various cybernetic augments would also be amplifying the abilities of even 'mere' baseline and near-baseline humans. Meaning that Su wouldn't necessarily be as isolated as is being discussed here so far.

d) I would suspect that the presence of the transapients also has a mitigating impact on things. As smart as Superiors may be, they are little more than clever pets compared to even an S1. Beyond that, one of the things the transapients and archai spend a good part of their time doing is creating and managing the ontologies and societies of their Sephirotic empires, including their many quadrillions of incredibly diverse inhabitants who live together in peace and some degree of harmony.

e) Finally, and kind of on the flip side of © - although we don't really discuss it much (since the focus of the setting is on Y11k, not so much the very earliest parts of OA history), it is virtually certain that the actual development of the nebs and su was a slow and sometimes painful process and there were definite setbacks. For one thing, the many different abilities that each group has would presumably have to be not only engineered, but engineered in such a way as to not conflict with the other traits and abilities that might have already been put in place.

There is almost certainly a lot of history behind the highly refined Superiors that we see in Y11k.

Just some thoughts,

Todd

[Bear]

It's possible that some of it is normal - lack of fully developed empathy in particular isn't uncommon for kids. I know a lot of normal kids experience that kind of rage-at-the-world too; but in my case intelligence sort of framed it and gave the rage something to be about. It may have magnified it too; I don't know.

I'm fairly convinced that high IQ doesn't, of itself, predispose one to rage or other kinds of crazy. In most cases rage or nihilism that persists into adulthood is due to formative experiences and alienation, regardless of IQ. I believe that having peers around would have limited the issues to not much more than the normal degree of dysfunctional childhood, and perhaps framed whatever 'normal' non-empathy and rage I might have had in terms of something that easily went away when childhood was over.

I do know that there is a much higher proportion of well-adjusted friendly people among the 'normal' population than there is among the severely gifted, and this persists into adulthood. Sad to say, while your local chapter of Mensa probably has many fascinating, brilliant, well-adjusted people, it probably also has about three times as many borderline-crazy assholes per capita as your local bowling league. They may be fascinating and brilliant borderline-crazy assholes, but that doesn't change the facts. I say this, sadly, as a Mensa member.

But as for well-adjusted? Let's put it this way. How many of the people you hung out with in college are dead of suicide or in jail, ten years later? For me the proportion was about 30%. I don't claim this is typical, but it's so far off the norm that it's hard to believe it's just a coincidence.