11-13-2016, 01:40 AM
(11-12-2016, 06:35 AM)Bear Wrote: I think one of the biggest effects would be negative - the sense of alienation when your brain doesn't work the same way as other people's can be intense.
If you want to have sane people with Augmented Intelligence, you can't have just one, and you can't have them scattered around with no contact with each other. To develop or maintain sanity, we need peers.
Of course, that brings fear into the equation. Putting a bunch of them in contact with each other makes them an existential risk to everyone else.
I think this would again come down to what sort of IA we are talking about here. A cybernetic augment that can be easily taken on and off (think 'magic glasses' with a very fast internet connection and an advanced interface of some kind) probably wouldn't cause issues with either alienation or being a threat at all.
Genetically engineering someone for increased intelligence might cause feelings of alienation or it might not - it would depend on just what we mean by enhanced intelligence as well as how the culture around the person/people treated them. Someone who is pretty much the same as everyone else but has amazing musical talent or the ability to do complex mathematics in their head might not be inclined to feel all that alienated at all.
Until we can get a fairly clearly agreed upon definition of what we mean by 'enhanced intelligence' and what form of it we are considering, then a lot of this becomes an exercise in everyone having a different thing in mind and we spend a lot of time talking past one another.
As far as whether or not enhanced people would be a threat - why would they be? Or why would they be more of a threat than all the unenhanced people running around who can build bombs or whip of plagues in a college bio lab if they felt so inclined? I realize this is a common trope in SF (whether speaking of cybernetic or gengineered beings), but is it objectively a significant threat or does it say more about our fears of the 'the other'?
Todd