Zvi Benson-Tilsen argues that short AGI timelines do not make reprogenetics useless

Essay author Zvi Benson-Tilsen proposes using a pause in AI development to advance genetic methods for future children

On August 8, Zvi Benson-Tilsen published an essay on LessWrong about short timelines to AGI, a hypothetical form of AI capable of solving a wide range of tasks. He argues that reprogenetics should remain part of the strategy. This field covers future methods for selecting or altering the genome of a future child.

The debate begins with the timeline. If AGI arrives in ten or fifteen years, a child with selected or altered inherited traits would still be a child at that point. Critics of reprogenetics therefore argue that resources should instead go toward methods that could help people who are already adults.

Benson-Tilsen views this period differently. In his model, a pause in AGI development would provide time to find more reliable ways to reduce existential risk, meaning the risk of a catastrophe affecting all of humanity.

“We need to pursue the remaining paths that could still lead to success. There are few of them, and enhancing human intelligence is one,” he writes.

By reprogenetics, the author means a long-term engineering program that includes producing germ cells outside the body, selecting genetic variants, and developing future methods for editing the genome. He compares this program with efforts to enhance cognition in adults through interventions in the brain. In his assessment, that approach also requires new technologies, a series of experiments, and methods for measuring changes in cognition. He therefore proposes developing both approaches and testing them in practice.

In a comment on the essay, one reader objects that even people with greater abilities would need years of education, while the available data could become the limiting factor. The disagreement then comes down to how the time provided by a pause should be used: whether resources should be divided between work involving people alive today and preparations for the next generation.