Interview
Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity
- The speaker projects that genomics will undergo a transformation from "wet" laboratory processes to a fully cloud-based model within five years, driven by the global distribution of small sequencers at clinics for near-instantaneous data upload and reporting.
- CRISPR technology is expected to enable massively multiplexed edits within approximately 10 years, coinciding with the mastery of creating human eggs from induced pluripotent stem cells, which will remove egg scarcity as a limiting factor for embryo selection.
- Prediction accuracy for traits such as IQ and facial appearance is forecast to improve significantly as datasets expand to 1–2 million phenotyped genomes, potentially reducing the standard error of IQ predictors to approximately 10 points and enabling face reconstruction for embryos.
- Non-European biobanks are anticipated to go online within five years, resolving current prediction accuracy gaps caused by tagging decay across ancestry groups, with China potentially leading in intelligence predictor development within 50 years due to data volume and state focus.
- Longevity predictions suggest that nonlinear effects could allow elite individuals to reach ages of 300 within the next few decades, creating a potential bimodal societal distribution and widening inequality gaps if lower-income groups cannot access genetic enhancements.
- The speaker forecasts that embryo selection could expand to 20% of the population in developed nations, driven by rising maternal age and IVF costs, while government intervention might eventually fund genomic services to prevent extreme inequality.
- Current limitations in cognitive measurement data, attributed to fear of controversy, may stall the development of accurate IQ predictors for a decade or more, despite the expectation that polygenic scores for educational attainment will eventually be replaced by direct intelligence metrics.
- While the speaker claims a short-term "first mover advantage" through clinic relationships and trust, this is predicted to erode over the long term as the scientific moat fades and competition shifts toward companies capable of aggregating massive, diverse global datasets and securing specific patent portfolios for error correction.
- Regulatory scrutiny is expected to increase, though the decentralized nature of genomic data is viewed as a barrier to global enforcement, with the speaker noting a historical inconsistency in modern progressive opposition to eugenic practices.
- The high-dimensional space of genetic variation is believed to contain sufficient information to independently vary approximately 1,000 human traits without interference, allowing for the pruning of highly heritable diseases and potentially leaving lifestyle-based diseases as the primary cause of morbidity by 50 to 100 years in the future.