# An alternative approach to superbabies

*(Note: This post might be slightly funnily written but it is not a joke but serious and important.)*

Me: I think it's possible that we might not need to figure out biotechnological advances for how we can create superbabies through embryo selection or so, but that actually  they might already be around 1000 or more superbabies born on earth per year, only they happen to be born into an environment where they don't get educated and don't learn the necessary skills to advance science. By superbabies I mean genetic potential for intelligence of >=+7std on the human distribution.

Imaginary person (IP): What, how could that be true? There being some hunter tribe of genetical supergeniuses which are almost not communicating with the rest of humanity?

Me: Sorta yeah.

IP: And where would those superbabies be?

Me: Here:

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![](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/orcaleaping.jpg)

IP: Are you joking?

Me: No. See [this excellent reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/16y81ct/the_case_for_whales_actually_matching_or_even/) (or my [wrapper post around it](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRShuaWgKjizM4xPM/could-orcas-be-trained-to-be-smarter-than-humans)) for why it's IMO a pretty reasonable guess. Actually just read this right now before continuing. It takes only 5min. (ADDED: You could now also read [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRShuaWgKjizM4xPM/could-orcas-be-trained-to-be-smarter-than-humans?commentId=XQmfnXtMKrviaCyGN), but I still strongly recommend reading the reddit post first.)

IP: Ok but it's actually just a fun relatively unlikely possibility right?

Me: No. My current guess would 50% that orcas could do superhuman scientific problem solving (aka >=+7std[^idzm7qtxdzb]) if they actually trained themselves at it for human equivalent amounts and had human equivalent interfaces for research (e.g. BCI for using a computer). Though I only tried to form a model of orca intelligence for 2 days[^3qondrm25j1], so [please tell me more evidence and considerations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRShuaWgKjizM4xPM/could-orcas-be-trained-to-be-smarter-than-humans).

Though even if we tried significantly[^9a7kxbco5n8] I'd only give it like 15% chance that within the next 30 years, orcas could in one year solve theory-bottlenecked problems for which science would've taken 20 years.[^mlcake1eqqa] (Yeah I know 15% is still ridiculously high considering how crazy the plan sounds.)

E.g. orcas might want to rather do orca stuff, or there might be orca-cultural pressure against spending a large chunk of a day studying, or communicating with orcas turns out to be much harder than my median expectation[^6zgff5dtdc5]. (Please comment if you have more considerations on why it might (not) work.)

Can someone please look into this?
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I think conditional on orcas being >=+7std intelligent, I'd be about as excited about this as about trying to get human superbabies soon.[^m4mf23znru]

I'd guess it might not be all that hard to get a better guess on how smart orcas are in comparison to humans. E.g. get a guess on how sophisticated their language is, see how good they are at pattern recognition or learning to solve simple math or other problems[^z2klq9muzd]. (Though in the cases where orcas perform well we'd still have some uncertainty about how well it's going to generalize to hard science problems I guess.)

Can people (you?) please look into this, and if it seems like orcas might be superhumanly smart work to become able to communicate well with them etc?[^9u7jrrstm74]

(ADDED: Please let me know if you're planning to look into it more thoroughly (and also when you changed your mind and not planning it anymore).)

Cautionary notes
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There's a lot of important questions to think through which I haven't thought through at all. Here's a very non-exhaustive list:

1.  How aligned are orcas with humans?
2.  How well could we trade with orcas if we e.g. give them power by having them try to solve the alignment problem?
3.  How would people react if there was significant evidence of orcas being (a) human-level intelligent or (b) singificantly smarter than humans?

I feel sorta relatively optimistic here though.

Also the the plan here would obviously NOT be to keep orcas in captivity and try to train and extract useful cognitive work from them, but to build study places for orcas where they can come to of their own accord and communicate with humans and be taught.

Sidenote on how orcas (and pilot whales) could be useful datapoints for AI alignment
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*(feel free to skip this if you're not interested in alignment.)*

Steven Byrnes is trying to reverse engineer the steering subsystem in human brains. My uncertain guess is that this probably is not directly amazingly useful for aligning AI, but I'm still a big fan of his agenda. A major reason for this is that understanding the steering subsystem might help us to better understand how human values form, and that we might be able to generalize the understanding a bit to see how we might align AIs.

If there are other intelligent species on earth, we could reverse their steering subsystems too and observe and understand how their values form, and we'd thereby have multiple datapoints which seems like a lot better basis for forming good generalizing models of what alignment-machinery we need for shaping the (values of the) AI as we want.

[^idzm7qtxdzb]: where most of the 50% probability mass is actually on orcas being even vastly smarter than +10std humans would be 

[^3qondrm25j1]: Though FWIW I think my considerations are probably more thorough than you might expect given the 2 days. E.g. see this comment. 

[^9a7kxbco5n8]: (e.g. 1 billon dollars and a few very smart geniuses going into trying to make communication with orcas work well) 

[^mlcake1eqqa]: UPDATE 2024-11-10: I've gotten very slightly more optimistic that orcas are smart enough, and significantly more optimistic on how feasible it would be, especially in terms of how much it would cost (and how long it would take). Currently I'm at like 30% that I could do it with $50M in 25 years (aka like 55% conditional on orcas being smart enough). (Though tbh for almost anyone else I'd assign a chunk lower probability.) My estimate will likely change further but I probably won't update this post further, but feel free to ask me in the future on my updated estimate via comment or PM. 

[^6zgff5dtdc5]: (where tbc my median guess still says it will be very difficult - but perhaps feasible given a highly selected group of geniuses) 

[^m4mf23znru]: Though with better understanding we might of course be able to predict much better what approach is more promising, rather than thinking they are similarly promising. 

[^z2klq9muzd]: Tbc, I'd not expect current orcas to be able to compete with current humans in abstract problem solving, because orcas are probably basically not trained in it at all. But we could see how fast they learn it and maybe compare how fast a human who didn't get education can learn it. 

[^9u7jrrstm74]: I'm currently not quite yet excited enough myself / I am more excited about my current agenda (which I am unusually excited about - the orca thing is still among the top contenders). Also I have much higher irreplaceability on my agenda whereas I might not have that great of a competetive advantage on the orca stuff.